THE SITE I LIKE

Nihon Kaigun or the Imperial Japanese Navy Page, is a site I've been visiting for over 5 years. It's premise is to explore how the naval force which achieved numerical and operational superiority in the Pacific in the first month of World War II ended up loosing the war. There are several regular contributors to the site most of whom are historical researchers or marine archiologists. The site loads quickly. It is easy to navigate. The information is segrated by content, images in on one page, operational chronologies of individual ship on another, analyses of the causes of sinkings in yet another and so on. The site is maintained and updated. The most recent postings I found before writing this were on 9/9/03. The older material is archived and available as well. The emphasis is definately on the ships rather than people or events. But somehow this is acceptable given the way mariners anthropomorphize the things. It also doesn't mean that such material wouldn't included if articles of sufficient quality were provided to the site. This site would make a good addition to CHNM list of history web sites since there are so few on that list which deal with our opponents in wars.

THE SITE I'M READY TO THROW THINGS AT

This has to be the Department of the Navy's Naval Historical Center. Even before I read Sheila Brennan's comment "... the Naval Historical Center's web site is difficult to mine ..." I knew this to be a frustrating place to go. The site is geared more toward tell the public how to get in touch with the various sections of the Center than providing data. This not to say there isn't data available from this site it's just darned hard to get to. For example, I don't know how the internal search engine works but it doesn't search for content of the thousands of pages stored at this site. It looks for titles of pages but does it look for Key words? I don't know. If it does then it wont work very well because based on the few pages I've checked the page authors have done a poor job in assigning keywords to their pages. In most instances there were no keywords assigned.

The navigation of the welcome page is confusing. Starting at the top there are two hypertext phrases that lead to pages that tell you how to visit or contact the center. Next comes four big buttons linked to a What's New Page, Frequently Asked Questions, the search engine, and information about the Freedom of Information Act. Underneath the buttons are 30 hypertext links that may take you some where useful but most likely will not. Where the researcher really needs to go is the Frequently Asked Questions button. This goes to nearly 200 links to useful information. But the questions are listed alphabetically and they lead to other lists which may lead to yet more lists. While not one of the readings for this week mentions the "three click" rule it should be used in the evaluation of any site and this one violates this rule big time.

What is the "three click" rule? If a visitor to the site hasn't found what he is looking for withing three mouse clicks they begine to get frustrated and will look else where if an alternative is available. This is related to what Larry Gales in "Web Page Design Inspired by Edward Tufte" is refering to when he talks about being "user center". Page design is not for the benefit of the author but of those who will use the page and needs to be constructed with that i mind at all times.

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