designing for the history web
The reading in Digital History for this week raise a lot of interesting points. Most important, I think is finding the right level of aesthetics versus content. We’ve all dealt with pages, admittedly more and more being leftovers from the early days of the web, where there just seems to be “no there there,” just a list of links down a white page. On the other end, there are also a lot of pages where the effort to make them works of art has just about crowded out the content. After a certain point one reaches overload, and use of the “bells and whistles” looks amateurish rather than otherwise. The standard we expect tends to vary by domain name, a .org or a .edu should look better than a .com unless it is an obvious personal page without academic content.
Neither is design everything. A site with a sufficiently illustrious brick and mortar organization, a high-level domain, and good content can overcome design issues. The preceding link is the first one you come to when you look up “Challenger accident” on Google. This despite the fact that it looks more like a personal page and has not been updated since 1997.
March 20th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Wow, that Challenger website is totally something I would probably skip over, based solely on design. But you’re right, the content is really good. It definitely speaks to the importance of a good, “modern” looking webpage however.
March 20th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
I agree, design isn’t everything..but at the same time its one of those elements that can make or break you. I know we have talked about url’s being more trustworthy than others, but I think that sometimes people trust a flashy site more than they trust a non-designed site.