A New Design Metaphor (for me)
Pat Delaney and I have come up with what I think is a novel way of designing a template for large groups with many "individualistic" departments. It's kind of a site on a site, or stacked webpages.
On the first (background) layer, two thin bars, left vertical and top horizontal, are joined in the top left corner of the page, drawing the eye to a central school image (in this case, Martin Luther King) and permalink to the school home site. On the second (foreground) layer, managing editors can carefully insert banner images representative of different functions or departments. The theme also includes a directory of the school's most important sites, a seach engine link, and a drop down window for navigating teacher and class blog pages.