What do your students first see when they open your training site? What do they first click on, where are their eyes drawn? Can they find their subject easily, and is your content, and process for using this content intuitive?

In my eLearning time I have experimented with a few different layouts. Each have had their merits (or I wouldn’t have used them in the first place) but though interviewing current users, and experimenting with different styles I feel that I am always finding a better way to lay out my site.

When I first started using eLearning I used Blackboard, and my layout for a subject looked like this:

As you can see, I had all my subjects down the side, and then exams up the top of the subject page, and the content (video tutorials hosted on youtube) underneath. In this particular subject there were about 6 videos stacked under each other.

When I moved to Moodle (http://moodle.org), I tried to be a little more organised. I introduced a matrix at the top of my page (how to and benefits post to come), but continued with the videos stacked under each other on the page. You can see that at the bottom of this video is the exam relevant to it, this change meant that there was less confusion, and more continuity. The thinking behind this layout was that students just worked their way down the page, but this didn’t always work because students would stop and start.

I found both of these methods, while each having merits, to be relatively ineffective. They cluttered the page, distracted the students, and overwhelmed them.

My most recent subject looks like this:

While it looks a little… boring (I will jazz it up a little later with larger font etc.) it’s really easy to view, easy to use, and self explanatory. If you want to view the slideshow for the subject, what do you choose?

This particular subject has only one slideshow, one quiz, and one dicussion (note that I added in a discussion board for each subject now). If I were doing a subject with more then one slide, I might divide it up into learning outcomes, or just into half, or thirds and label each topic as “learning outcome 1″ or “Part 1″.

My videos are now called slideshows, and that’s because that’s exactly what they now are. When one clicks on “view slideshow” a new page opens and they see this:

Slideshare is a tool I’ve mentioned before, and they can easily make this a full screen slideshow. It has voice over as well.

So that’s my tip for layouts is KISS (Keep is simple, stupid). Make it easy to read, understand and use.

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