Unit Five: Building a Web Culture (Style Design Standards and HTML 5)

Style or substance?  After last week's look at a number of digital history projects we discussed how the level of sophistication of a site and the timeliness of the material on a given site are not necessarily related.  Some of the sites we looked at (the Library of Congress' American Memory site, for example) are not the most sophisticated, but are actually the most up-to-date.  This week, we are going deeper in to the style of a site and how the style may impact, for better or worse, a site's substance.

When looking back and reexamining a few of the sites from last week, I played close attention to the relationship between style and substance.  Take the site for the Amiens Cathedral Project from last week.  It is beautiful - photo after stunning photo of the cathedral, but there is no way to search.  If I'm an architecture student looking for examples of a particular style of archway, I can't simply type in my search, you just have to click through the different sections.  Unfortunately, clicking on some links lead you to pages with no way to return to the home page without hitting the "back" button.  From the navigation bar I clicked "sculptural program" and I was sent to the screen below:

Sculptural Program Page - Navigational Menu is no longer available.

The only way for me to get back to another section of the site is to repeatedly click the back button (or use the drop-down feature on the back button) to get to a page with a navigational menu.

I didn't articulate it at the time, but thinking about my reaction to some of the sites we examined last week, I was pretty hard on them.  I made snap decisions based on a quick look at each home page and maybe a few clicks in, without looking deeper into the content and how the style impacted my use of the content.  I need to take that into consideration when creating my own site for my final project.  Right now I'm planning on creating a site specifically for my students.  I'm not looking to attract users from various search engines, looking to drive traffic and usage to my site - I know my target audience will reach and use my pages.  Who is using my site, and how they are getting there could impact my design.  If I am hoping people will stop on my page after a quick google search, my style and look of my site might be more important than if I am creating a site for a "captive" audience.  That will impact the sort of web presence I might need.