Clio Wired (History 696)

The Media History Project, hosted by the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is a web design train wreck. For starters, the entry page consists of a Flash animation composed of cheesy clip art, complete with ridiculous soundtrack, which lasts almost a minute. To have your eyes and ears abused, click here. For those of you with a dial-up connection, or if you prefer to take my word for the quality of the Flash, you can go directly to the index page here.

Once you (finally) arrive at said index page, the reader is a assailed by the layout and colors of the site. The header is a competently composed image, but the main article on the page (a story about the “Dick and Jane” primer) is titled with plain Times New Roman text on a block of turquoise background color. The surfer is confused by dual navigation bars, on the left and right of the main content. Note that the first three buttons on the left nav bar don’t even match – “Search the Project” and “About the Project” are both white-on-black buttons, but “Advisory Boards” floats by itself as a simple link. The layout method appears to be based upon tables, although the site does use a CSS file.

On my browser, the menu on the right hand side overlaps the right-hand column of text from the Dick & Jane article. That article also has a very annoying bunch of blue borders at seemingly random places. The “meat” of the site are the Net links in the right-side menu, giving the surfer resources elsewhere on the Web that deal with the history of various media, such as television, comics, print, and computing. Each media type has its own webpage, but the layout and design between these pages are not consistent. Overall, a very flawed site. To be fair, the copyright notice is from 1996, but some content was updated as late as 2002, and the University of Minnesota is still maintaining the site.

A site with very good design belongs to the Journal of American History. The clean, elegant layout is complemented by well-chosen, muted colors and limited use of graphics.

The HTML code reads well, and although the site has a hybrid layout composed of both tables and CSS, it works well and never clogs the browser. A horizontal navigation bar across the top, beneath the header image, guides the user through the site. Pages with self-explanatory names such as “Issues,” “Web Projects,” and “About the JAH” provide information on the site’s structure without guesswork on the part of the user. New pages maintain the same header and color scheme, with left hand menus opening that allow the user to go further into the site. The main navigation bar stays in place so the surfer is never lost. All images also have alt tags that let a browser surfing without images to still navigate the site easily. It’s clear what everything does and where to find what you’re looking for. None of the windows ever require the user to scroll down more than a few clicks of the mouse, as well. A very good site.