Next week, Carleton College will launch a redesigned home page and other new web site features. We invite you to check out a sneak preview of the new look and content.

Gerry McGovern explains why the simple link is the heart of the web in his article "The Collaborative Web."

Carleton College web services staff members Mark Heiman, Matt Ryan, and Nate White were honored with coveted ‘Red Stapler’ awards at the HighEdWeb National Conference held last month in Rochester, N.Y. An annual gathering of higher education web professionals from over 200 colleges and universities from around the world, HighEdWeb is committed to “advancing web professionals, technologies, and standards in higher education.”

We've made a subtle (but we think significant) improvement to all the photo galleries hosted on Carleton's website. Previously, photos would open in a popup window, which you would have to close to see the next image. Now the galleries behave more like a slideshow, allowing you to go directly from one image to the next.

Oops. We had an outage of Planet Carleton last night and into this morning, caused by a mistake we made when we added 16 (!) new feeds. We thought we had gotten out the kinks enough to not label it "beta" anymore, but then something like this comes up and bites us.

I'd like to bring your attention to some of the latest Carleton site designs: Off Campus Studies, Philosophy, and the site for the upcoming Art Gallery exhibition Chikanobu. We're trying out some new design directions with these sites, and I hope you like them.

Here's a rundown of what's new and upcoming in Reason: slideshows, form enhancements, randomized page elements, image and asset sorting, profiles, podcasting, blogs, and more!

Jeff Croft elegantly summarizes why you get more out of a designer when you come to him or her with a problem rather than with a solution.

We at Carleton's Web Services Group have released a Beta version of Reason, a free, open-source web content management system. Built in PHP/MySQL, Reason allows you to build a powerful, full-featured suite of web sites very easily, with your web browser. It is the engine behind 90% of Carleton's web presence, and we are actively improving and developing it. We are hoping to build a community of people and organizations who are interested in collaborating on an open tool for managing web content. More information and download

Reason now supports podcasting. Find out what that means, and what to do to produce a podcast for your office or department.

Web content guru Gerry McGovern reminds us that "The best websites know that customers are ready for action. They help customers complete common tasks quickly and easily."

Read the article.

Feeds are a useful way to subscribe to the information on a web site. When you subscribe to a feed, you get updated when information is added to the site. We've written an overview of feeds and how they work. Check it out!