This week I will mostly be working on...

A new theme for the Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle) at Shrewsbury 6th Form College.

Currently the Moodle interface at the college has many drawbacks:

Whilst the layout is full width, it does not make use of screen 'real estate' intelligently. A huge amount of space is given over to daily notices. Although some attempt is made to draw attention to these through the use of colour and animated GIFs (!) the overall effect is a wall of text that most students simply don't read.

It doesn't offer a 'jumping off' point to other areas and the blocks used are not organised or used in a way that considers the end users.

Also the header image is huge and takes a lot of room without really offering any useful functionality. Essentially it is the header from the website and students when asked have never used any of the  links along the top.

My proposed design:

 

The new design is fixed width (optimised for a minimum horizontal resolution of 1024). The announcements have been replaced by a content slider that I propose to hook up to a standard news forum. The message will change every 10 seconds or so and show the last four messages added to the news forum. 

The design does not reflect the final content only the layout. It's likely that emerging requirements will mean the content will change but this can be done through the standard Moodle blocks and content editing.

See the current progress at:

Test Moodle site