Screws in my coffee

I finally designed a web site for Huston-Tillotson University that I am prod of. It may be the last in-house web design that I will do for HT. Soon the site may be out-sourced to a development company. So this is why I did some screen shots for my blog.

HT Development Web Site

The site is done using Dot Net Nuke. This is a skin design for DNN 5.3. I started using DNN when I first came to HT back in 2004. At the time the university was using version 2 so I have migrated and grown to love and hate DNN over the last 5 years. I have come to the conclusion that no content management system is fool proof and easy for the end user.

HT Athletic home page

For the athletic home page I had the requirements to have two menus on the page. The athletic department wanted a set of images and menus to appear on all pages. This was the foundation of the site. The main page has static content that is updated rarely. The main page needed to show athletic department links on the left side of the page and the right side shows all of the sports divided by men and women categories.

HT Volleyball main page

The volleyball main page shows a typical sports site layout. In DNN I created each sport as a sub portal of the main athletics site. This allows for the administration to be managed efficiently but allows local administration to be owned by the head coach of each sport.

HT Athletics forms and lists

One of the nice improvements in DNN 5.2 is what use to be called User Defined Tables, Forms and Lists. You can create CSS styled lists or tables that can also be transformed into data entry forms. I love this feature but it is not easy for end users to configure and use.

I was working on my wife’s blog and decided to update the look and feel of my own. I selected a theme that was originally designed by Benedikt Rieke-Benninghaus. The theme name: Dynamic-Vision 10. The theme URI: http://benediktrb.de. It is cool that Sylvia is getting into blogging and we have a similar theme on our sites.

Here is my original theme during 2005-2006: I took the banner with my camera. I got a cup of cold day old coffee and dumped some screws in it and started shooting pictures with my Canon 10D.

Here is my next theme during 2006-2007: I got the name for this blog from a friend that I worked with when I was in the Unification Church. His name was Walter Frank and if I remember correctly he would joke about screws in his coffee. I started writing a book of poems and titled it Screws in my Coffee.

Here is my current theme for summer 2008: So now I have revised my blog theme to a lighter bigger font. I am not sure why I picked the black background of the previous theme. I usually do not like black web pages. Anyway this layout looks really cool to me. I spent most of the day working on Sylvia’s blog and then decided to use the theme on my blog.