I have been working for about a month now on redesigning So You Want To Teach? I want to make it even more reader friendly. I’m excited about the changes that will be coming this week. In fact, the redesigned site has now made its debut! If you’re reading in a RSS reader, come check it out. Let me know what you think.

Wow, look at the colors!
I have changed the color scheme and the heading graphic a little bit. The goal is to add some more color and make the site more inviting and more reminiscent of actually teaching children.

Why is there a question mark next to my comment?
Because you haven’t set up a Gravatar! Go set one up, wait a little while, and come back to see your new Gravatar. When you get it set up, any time you write a guest post for the blog, your new Gravatar will appear in the upper left corner also.

What else have you changed?

• The sidebar has moved to the more traditional left side. I’m not sure why it is that blog designers have decided to generally move sidebars over to the right, and I got tired of that. So it’s in the normal place now.
• The layout is fluid (to a certain point). Around 95% of my visitors have resolution greater than 1,000 pixels wide, so I have gone with a fluid width (ie, you resize your window, the content resizes with it) and set the minimum width to 860. This way, more information fits on the screen, and I am sure that all readers get the same basic experience.
• The headlines are now in Small Caps and slightly larger, similar to many newspaper headlines.
• The text in articles (excluding lists) is justified across the entire screen. Again, aiming for the newspaper-style look. Text has also been spaced out a bit more.
• Rounded corners are no more. They are so 2005 anyway!

So get a Gravatar to add some fun to the site. Tell me what you think. Stay tuned for the Carnival of Education on Wednesday.

10 Design Changes I Did To My WordPress Blog This Month
Inspired By So You Want To Teach?

Joel Wagner

Joel Wagner (@sywtt) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting.

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He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. So You Want To Teach? is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.