Getting started
There is a definite balancing act to make a good historical website. It is worthwhile to spend a decent amount of time on the “bells and whistles” in order to keep one’s page from being classified as on a par with personal pages. People do tend to equate slick pages with professionalism and reliable info unless it is obviously otherwise. Yet, on a project where the budget is minimal and the time is short, that is the area which will have to get shorted if the website is going to go up in useful form.
In terms of multimedia on websites, from the time Rosenzweig and Cohen wrote their book, Quicktime and RealPlayer have definitely taken over from Windows Media Player. Media Player is used by only a minority of sites. For audio, Quicktime seems to be the real favorite, and there are a number of long (hour plus) interviews available on a variety of sites for download or streaming through Quicktime. This could be a very interesting oral history collecting project, even if not on the scale of the Sonic Memorial Project, one could make the original interviews available as well as the transcripts, allowing others to catch the nuances which do not show up as well in the written form.
One thing which I wondered, and which Rosenzweig and Cohen did not touch on, was whether it was possible to convert between multimedia formats such as Quicktime or Media Player. It would make sense to have all the media on a site be the same, but if one is pulling it from online sources which use different players, it would be a real pain to require people to download two players in order to view everything on a site.
Lastly, the great computer graphic design question, Macs or PCs? Or does it not matter for history sites, where the focus is not on making the look of the site “top of the line”?
February 21st, 2006 at 8:05 am
I would be interested to hear the response to Macs or PC’s. I dont’ know enough to compare the two regarding graphic design, but I feel like I do notice the constant debate between Mac and PC users. Does the preference change based on your needs?
February 21st, 2006 at 11:34 am
I think you are on to something in regard to foramtiing or converting multimedia. This also picks up on Emily’s bit on PC’s vs Mac’s. For instance I have hundreads of songs downloaded on my PC however I have recently converted to using itunes. The problem being that not all of my cd’s, well nearly none, were able to be converted to itunes. Thus I cannot place them on my ipod either. This also gets to the discussion we had in class regarding storing data and hoping that the form in which it was saved will be easily converted in the future to the technology of that time.