Clio Wired (History 696)

Hyperhistory Online

Hyperhistory Online, how do you suck? Let me count the ways. Firstly, the navigation is excreable. There are egregious brown navigation buttons on the left-hand side that, when pushed, bring up information, not in the center frame (frames, ugh) where you would think that information would appear, but in the small frame on the right of the screen. If brown's not your color, you can push on the lovely pastel "color coded" buttons at the bottom of the screen--check out the awesome rollovers!--that will actually make information appear in the center frame. But get out those reading glasses! Hyperhistory online has "over 2,000 files covering 3,000 years of world history" and unfortunately, they present these files in the form of charts and timelines that are not only ridiculously confusing-looking with their miniscule text and their Easter egg color combinations, they also scroll from left to right!

Wait, it gets worse! When you click on one of the tiny timeline cells, it brings up further information--where? you guessed it! The right frame!
Okay, ugliness aside, the structure of this site is just all wrong. Even though the author tells you if you're lost you can "simply click on one of the five round navigation buttons on the left," the buttons make no sense and the left frame and bottom frame buttons both take you to different places so you can't find your way back (or forwards) for that matter. The text is hard to read, not only because it's so small, but because the colors make your eyes bleed. Having information pop up in the right frame instead of the center has the viewer confused, thinking that the link doesn't work because nothing is changing on the main screen.
The author (an architect, haha) explains that "the original concept for a synchronoptic timeline dates back to the time of our journey throughout Asia when I was writing about the histories of Asian cultures for a Swiss newspaper." Well congratulations to him because he has come full-circle; understanding this site is about as easy as reading about Asian cultures in French.

The Triangle Factory Fire
From Cornell University

The Triangle Fire web site's design, as Mike O'Malley would say, harmonizes with its content and with the message it tries to convey. The design is elegant, yet engaging. The text is easy to read and is presented in easy-to-chew chunks. The site is very navigable (is that a word?) with an easy search function and is a fully-functional hypertext, with links to resources interspersed throughout (but in a way that complements the site without distracting). The images are integrated into the text in a way that makes sense and doesn't detract; clicking on the images will bring you into a javascript window slideshow. The one suggestion I would make would be to switch the link color from default blue to a "hot color" (ala O'Malley)--this would fit in not only with the design scheme, but also obviously with the content of the site.