Why so cool? Well it was voted for by members of the Guild of Accessible webdesigners – an international guild no less. This commands some respect since it’s been assessed for it’s accessibleness to people with different accessible needs. The site itself deals with the subject of inclusive teaching – making your lectures, seminars and field trips accessible to all regardless of disability.

It was a long old project and not without its difficulties. The site itself is very basic looking so it’s a testament to the quality of the content written by subject experts and instructional designers that it gets this praise. It has a number of video clips that add a human face to the disabilities discussed – yes they’re all real people! These clips really lift the site and make it a little above the norm of verbose text you’d expect to find. So well done all involved – it’s a quality product.

We’ve been building this site throughout 2005 and a lot of the work was in creating the 150 or so video clips of real students and lecturers talking about their experiences.

A website for Associated Lecturers (tutors). This site is the first I’ve produced to use the new OU branding. It’s only available to people with a staff logon.

Incidentally, today is the day that the OU launches the newly branded website (not live yet at 15:30, but will be live by this evening). Whilst I had no involvement in the creation of the new brand or the main OU website it’s still a pretty exciting time. A colleague of mine, Donna did much of the work and she’s been grafting hard to meet today’s deadline. Well done!

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Here’s a screen shot of the first of many sites rolling of the Guy Carberry web design production line. It’s for a technology course here at the OU. It’s taken me a few days to fully realise the design but I’m fairly satisfied with the result.

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This is an internal page from the site with secondary navigation on the left.

Brief overview

The site uses an Aqua style interface with an aim to look a little bit space-age. I think it achieves this aim fairly well. It’s pure XHTML/CSS throughout and the tabs along the top use the fabled FIR (Fahner Image Replacement) technique. However the transistions use background-image positioning to avoid flicker in IE. All fascinating stuff I’m sure you’ll agree. The site wont be available unless you take the course but I’ll see if I can put an edited copy online for all you webby people to feast upon.