One of the most distressing things about
dealing with the web these days is that it's like trying to buy yogurt
at the grocery store -- the number of choices is overwhelming. Unfortunately
however, the search for a well-designed, easily-navigable history website
comes back depressingly slim. While I was hoping to find a “good”
and “bad” site in the subject of sport history, my future
dissertation subject area, my search in this topic turned up only a
maddeninly unending supply of poorly-designed, thoroughly bad sites.
And even though the search facilities and materials provided in the
baseball history sites maintained by the Library of Congress were very
useful, I was suprisingly disappointed in their designs. (See Baseball
Cards, 1887-1914, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bbhtml/bbhome.html,
and By Popular Demand: Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights,
1860s-1960s, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/jrhtml/jrhome.html.)
These two however, don't win the prize for poorest design.
That distinction goes to Breaking
the Barriers, a “sports history” site created by The
Houston Chronicle; (http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/sports/special/barriers/index.html.)
The site provides an overview of the men and women who helped break
down the racial barriers of the sporting world. While the image on the
homepage is a good beginning, the rest of the design and site is disappointing.
The internal pages offer a picture of the sports figure that visitors
select from the homepage, and a series of short paragraphs that serve
as a kind of textual timeline of that athlete's contribution. These
internal pages go on a frustratingly long time, rather than being broken
up into separate pages based upon some similar scheme that could have
been adopted for each individual. There are no links from most of the
internal pages, not even back to the homepage, which makes navigation
harder than it has to be for such a small site. Moreover, it would have
added some fairly easy depth to the site to establish links between
individuals who shared relationships -- for example, between Jackie
Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers manager, Branch Rickey. The page that
contained a review of a Jackie Robinson biography had some serious spacing
problems -- the text was jammed in a one-inch column toward the left
of the page. Although there was the standard black on white high contrast
for the text and background, some other color scheme would have softened
this almost completely textual site. Finally, some questions are posed
on the homepage that are never addressed, let alone answered.
For a well-designed site, I turned to
Early America. In contrast to the above, Women in America, 1820-1842
shows that a site does not have to be elaborate to be well-designed
(http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/detoc/fem/home.htm).
This site provides selected excerpts from nineteenth-century travelers
to the United States that supplement and assess the observations regarding
women found in Alexis de Tocqueville's more well-known Democracy
in America. In keeping with the time period, the designer has used
a decorative scrolling down the left-hand side of the site drawn from
a nineteenth-century publication. This scrolling is also nicely used
throughout the site as background for the selection buttons. There is
a link back to the homepage on each of the internal pages, and the search
facility on both author and topic works nicely. The scrolling prevents
the need for additional colorations; the high contrast of black text
on white background therefore makes the text easy to read. In short,
this is a simple, yet well-designed and useful website that was a pleasure
to visit. Oh, that there were more like it. The Women in America
site is also much better history than Breaking the Barriers,
but that would be a completely different journal entry.