Design and Structure

Here is my entry on website design and structure:

Frankly, of all the history websites available on the web, there are only a few that are truly well structured and designed. History is a content-rich profession, one that is dependent on the traditional book and journal formats that allow for effective collection and dissemination of information. Websites, while arguably more democratic than the book or journal, are not yet sophisticated enough to provide a large amount of information while maintaining a clean and efficient design. Nevertheless, with the advent of CSS and XHTML, as well as new design and useability theories, history websites are becoming more and more "elegant" and "pretty," without sacrificing content (the historian's bread-and-butter).

With that said, I found a history website that does an admirable job. Eyewitness to History successfully, but not flawlessly, merges style and structure (context) and historical information (content). First, the overall structure is relatively uncomplicated. Each section of the website is separated intuitively, permitting a quick learning curve in navigating the site and ascertaining available content. Second, the design strategy and color scheme are pleasant to the eye. Off-white backgrounds and menus and dark grey text decreases monitor contrast which makes the site more readable. Third, each article has a printer-friendly version, which is convenient for users who want to keep a copy for themselves.

Among the abundance of poorly-designed history websites I found one that is particularly dreadful: The History Guy. This aesthetically disastrous website features most of the design faux pas that web designers find unforgivable. This includes, but is not limited to, garish animated GIFs, needlessly long pages, absolutely no design continuity between pages, bulky headers and footers, unnecessary and poor-quality images, badly organized structure, and dysfunctional navigation.

The following are my examples of good and bad website design and structure:

• Good
• Bad