Dustin LindenSmith

As a volunteer project for my daughter's daycare centre, I'm doing some research into what constitutes good design for daycare websites. One of Google's first picks yielded this (obviously outdated) page on the subject. But despite the copyright notice stating 2004 (which MUST be a renewal -- this site looks circa 1998 to me), is there a way to definitively determine the creation date of a given web page?

I viewed the source for the page but didn't see anything obvious. Is there a way to discover the actual date stamp of a given web page?

By the way, if anyone here has any experience with developing (or seeing) a well-designed daycare website, please do reply with sample links, won't you? Looks like we're going to be doing a lot of our own creative, here. (Even with the depth provided on this page of Top 100 Preschool Sites...)

Edit: I had to add this site for further breadth to my examples. Make sure your speakers are on for the MIDI magic...

(x-posted to webdesign)

I've been waiting for this...

Click the image for a full-size screenshot or
go to the Google Calendar Start Page

On wickenden's reco, I started using Upcoming.org's online calendar service, but although I really dug the RSS feed of my schedule (which I could slip oh-so-easily onto my NetVibes start page (NetVibes was also a great tip from wickenden, and it's a service which I love more than words can say -- especially since they added tabbed pages this week)), I found Upcoming.org's usability to be poor. Takes too long to create appointment entries and there's no feature to schedule recurring tasks at all.

Google Calendar solves all that with a super intuitive "Quick Add" entry field that parses a simple sentence into an event. Type "Lunch meeting with Don on Apr 30 from 12:00-14:00 at Salvatore's" and it creates an appointment for exactly that date and time and puts "Salvatore's" into the location field. Reminders can be sent by e-mail, SMS or phone, and the nifty "Agenda" view displays all of your upcoming appointments (the Agenda can also be mailed to you each morning at 5 AM if you like). It's beautiful! The GUI is also à la Gmail and integrates nicely into the whole deal.

If Google adds a decent project/task management/scheduling component to this and then rolls out a full release of Writely (the free, web-based document editing tool which Google recently bought) and then adds a simple spreadsheet app that covers the most common functions used by most folks, then we'll finally have a possible choice to migrate from MS Office for a fully-integrated productivity app. I'm very impressed, and very happy.

After using Google Calendar for a half-hour, I already have a hit list of usability improvements they could make, but knowing from my experience with Gmail how long it takes those suggestions to get implemented, I won't waste much time on that for now. I sure wish I could work on a usability team for Google Labs, though. I know I could help improve their interfaces and features really quickly.