First drafts of four guides

I am pretty excited, as I have finished the first drafts of four of the guides:

• Civil & Environmental Engineering,
• Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering,
• Electrical & Electronic Engineering, and
• Mechanical Engineering.

I have emailed the links to a couple of colleagues and my supervisor at work, so hopefully I will receive some feedback soon.

There are still a few changes that I'd like to make (like possibly adding some more images and maybe a del.icio.us tag cloud), but I thought it would be a good idea to get some feedback at this stage and make modifications over the next couple of weeks.

Some of the things that I have considered while making the guides include:

• Keeping the structure of guides consistent and the layout of the pages within the guides consistent:
• I have done this by using the same layout for all the guides, for example I have used the same tab or page names and I have used a two column layout on all the pages except the home pages.
• Placing important information prominently in the guides:
• I have included a list of a few key resources on the home page for each of the guides, so that if students do not read the rest of the guides they will still get some value out of it.
• I have put instructions on how to find each type of resource in the same place on each page: the top left-hand box.
• I have tried to order lists of resources by placing those most likely to be useful first (rather than ordering lists alphabetically).
• Reducing the amount of content:
• I have tried to keep the text to a minimum and have used simple language.
• I have tried to keep lists of resources short and break longer lists up into multiple boxes.
• I link to more detailed information in other guides, rather than trying to repeat everything in my guide.
• I have tried to minimise the amount of scrolling on each page.

I have also been using my master engineering guide a lot to link to content in the guides, so that they are consistent and will be easy to maintain. This has already been useful, as I few times I have decided to change the text in a box or the description for a link and it has been reflected in all the guides automatically!

Next I need to start writing up my report, finish the modifications to the first four guides and hopefully complete the last three guides!