Web Design

Good Web Site Design:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Bad Web Site Design:
Society for Military History Headquarters

The USHMM web site is a nice example of a good web site with good design. While it does have a lot of information on it, the site does not at all appear "busy." Particularly because of the muted colors that are used on the site don't make the site appear "busy." The links on the site are easily located by visitors to the site. However, I would change the location of the top two boxes of links. I would put the "history" menu of links second under the menu boxincluding links to information on the museum itself. On a museum such as this many visitors are probably coming to the web site looking for information before they plan a visit. That information should be easily accessable at the top of the web site and visitors should not have to scroll for it.

The Society for Military History Headquarters is a good example of a very badly designed site. Most visitors won't look at every part of a web page and therefore may not make it down to the bottom of the page where the links are included. An easy to use menu bar on the left side of the page would be much better in terms of giving visitors the links they're looking for quickly.

This page is also badly designed in terms of its graphical presentation. The bright red links on a white background can be very hard to read. This page also suffers from a lack of graphics other than the SMH logo at the top of the page which contributes to its boring nature, thus chasing even more visitors away.