PROJECT INTRODUCTION

The following is a proposal for a digital history website that will explore the advertising used to promote the sales of the Pontiac GTO. As it was the first of what were referred to as "muscle cars," a new and innovative type of automobile that first entered the marketplace in 1964 and remained in production for ten years, the GTO would be an appropriate model to explore the muscle car era in automotive history.

The site’s main purpose will be to explore the meaning of the muscle car era through GTO advertising in both sales’ brochures, print ads and a few television spots.  An important underlying theme of the site will be to argue that the rise of these types of cars demonstrated that the U.S. auto industry was producing novel and technically advanced automobiles.  They were produced with so many options that the consumer could literally design a truly unique car, satisfying his or her desire for a one-of-a-kind expression of individuality.  The visitor to this website will be able to see the advertisements as they were originally published, read through a scholarly narrative of the GTO, its advertising and its impact on U.S. culture and how that culture impacted the car itself.  They may also take a trip on an interactive timeline that will explore many aspects of the muscle car era, see competitors’ advertisements as they attempted to jump on the muscle car bandwagon, see what options were available, how many muscle cars were sold each year, among other facts.  A number of questions will be explored as well, including what impact thoughts of gender and place had on the advertising campaigns and what such thoughts said about society in the counter-culture era.

Ultimately I hope to produce a website that would interest scholars of the 1960s, advertising, culture, and the automobile. I also believe that aficionados, gear-heads, and other enthusiasts would find my site to be of interest. I would show that the GTO in particular and the muscle car in general were an important factor in American society and that impact is still with us. For example, the GTO has reappeared, as have other muscle cars, with more being designed as we speak.  The GTO still makes appearances in movies and television, most recently on episodes of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and "Overhaulin’."  Vin Diesel's main co-star in the motion picture "XXX" was a GTO.  Interest in the GTO and other muscle cars is still strong, as evidenced by their escalating prices on the collector-car market. GTO Judges now routinely sell for six figures, while Hemi-engined Plymouths and Dodges now sell for seven figures, and these cars originally retailed for less that $6,000!

PROJECT SCOPE

This project will be a combination of an illustrated electronic essay and an archive-database. It will also include an interactive timeline linked to elements of the database that will document the advertising campaign used by General Motors in particular to first introduce and then promote the sales of the GTO. Advertisements and information from other “muscle cars” will also be included. As time permits, other documentation may be included in the database, such as corporate decision memos, first-person remembrances or oral histories, and the order forms used by dealers and private buyers to order a muscle car, among other information.

Why study a car and its advertising? The automobile, most historians would agree, changed the landscape of our culture. It brought about the actual layout of our cities, permitted the rise of suburbia, and brought about massive government public building projects such as the superhighway program begun under President Dwight Eisenhower. It brought about an increase in the encroachment of the Federal government in the private sector through the regulation of the automotive industry at many levels. The automotive industry also employed millions of workers, from those in the factories to those pumping gasoline.

Ultimately this website is a vehicle (forgive the pun) to present arguments that will refute the findings of certain scholars of the automobile and advertising. Influential historians of the automobile have presented a number of arguments that I believe are great exaggerations or are just plain incorrect while others have come close to what I believe to be close to the "truth." James J. Flink has argued, correctly I think, that the auto is the last bastion of individualism for the “common man” left in our consumer society but he also argued that ecological concerns impacted the industry beginning in the mid-1960s, which was, I would argue, way too early and my study of the GTO would disprove his argument. (James J. Flink, "Three Stages of American Automobile Consciousness," American Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (October, 1972), p. 473.) Flink also argued that the U.S. auto industry lagged behind consumer desires in the 1960s who were pining for a European style smaller and more economical car. (Ibid., pp. 471-472) Here again I would argue that he is a decade too early. Lawrence J. White argued that U.S. manufacturers were “technologically stagnant” in the 1950s and 1960s, especially compared to the European manufacturers. (Lawrence J. White, The Automobile Industry Since 1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 258.) Again, I believe he is wrong and my proposed project would refute his arguments.

Other historians have examined advertising in the 1960s. Thomas C. Frank argued that businesses adopted advertising that appealed to the counter-culture not because the executives believed in the radical ideas of that culture but that they fit into the corporate interests. (Thomas C. Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Buisiness Culture, Counter Culture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). My proposal would show, at least from the perspective of General Motors, that this was not true either. Pontiac’s ad agency developed ads aimed to appeal to the baby-boomer generation’s beliefs in individual freedom and expressions of individualism but GM’s top management kept quashing their proposals.

The website will ultimately be guided by the “spirit” of ways to study advertising laid out in the Center for New Media and History’s website on advertising (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/Ads/online.html ) as well as take into consideration the current scholarship on advertising in general and automobile advertising in particular, such as Pamela Laird’s excellent article on just that topic as well as the scholars mentioned previously. (Pamela Walker Laird, "'The Car Without A Single Weakness': Early Automobile Advertising," Technology and Culture, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October, 1996), pp. 796-812. ) The questions that will be addressed include:
* Who developed the ad? Was the ad agency staffed primarily by white males in the 20s or 30s?
* What suggestions or instructions did Pontiac and GM give to the ad agency? Who were the executives at Pontiac and GM who made these decisions regarding ad content, target audience, etc.?
* Who was the target audience of the advertising?
* What impact or influence did the issue of gender have on this ad? What does the ad say about women and gender relations?
* What do the ads say about this period in U.S. history?
* What role, if any, did gender play in the development of the GTO? Race?
* What does the popularity of the muscle car say about popular culture at the time? Were enough sold (market impact) to draw any conclusions about that culture or about society during this time?

This website will include the following main subsections:
* An illustrated narrative essay that outlines the history of the GTO. It will contain my arguments as well as refutations of other scholars’ arguments (as mentioned earlier).
* An interactive timeline that will address the important occurrences/events, advertisements, order forms and sales catalogues, units sold, and will include information regarding the competing muscle cars available, all by model year.
* A section on GTO “hype” that will examine how the GTO impacted popular culture and society through an interactive examination of artifacts, songs, television shows, motion pictures, etc.
* A database that will include print advertisements, sales brochures, and a sampling of television ads.
* A glossary of terms used that will also have short biographies of the major individuals involved.
* A site map.
* A search engine.
* Possibly an email link that would permit some feedback from viewers.

The potential audiences that this site would be directed towards are as varied as the body color choices available to the GTO buyer. From Carousel Red to Orbit Orange, the colors offered covered the gamut of consumer taste, as would this website. Specifically I would hope to produce a website that would appeal to scholars interested in cultural history, the history of advertising, business history or the history of automobiles. I would also hope that aficionados, gear-heads, and other enthusiasts would find my site to be of interest. Indeed, all would be welcome.

Additionally the design and layout of the site would also be part of my argument. Each separate page will have a table of contents on the left border and each will be colored with one of the more interesting body colors available to the GTO buyer. This would support my argument regarding the ability of the buyer to “build” a car to suit his or her sense of individuality.
The above is a reflection of the realm of the possible versus the ideal. Given time and greater resources, this project has the potential of becoming a solid dissertation project. If that were to come about, I would add a number of other sections. These would include oral histories of surviving persons involved in the muscle car era, including the man who developed the GTO ad program, Jim Wangers. It would also include research trips to GM headquarters as well as the archives of Pontiac Motor Corporation. The Pontiac & Oakland Historical International Club has their own archives as well as contacts with many of the surviving individuals involved with Pontiac from the period under study.

SITE MAP

The website's organization will be fairly straightforward and linear to avoid confusing visitors who may have little or no specialized knowledge of the subject.  Links to each section will be available on every page, however, permitting the visitor to move within the website as they wish.
1) Homepage

2) Historical Narrative (interactive)

3) Historical Timeline (by model year)

1964: Model introduced; Ads; Brochures; Overall Sales
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974

4) Ad Database (by model year):

1964: Sales Brochures; Print Advertisements; Competitions' Print Advertisements.
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974

5) GTO "Hype" (similar to the Ad database with photo examples and sound clips where appropriate):

Television: "The Monkees"
Music: Ronnie & The Daytonas
            The Tigers 
             The Beach Boys
             Ronnie & The Brunettes
Clothing: Cuff Links, Shoes
Cologne

6) Glossary

7) Bibliography

8) Search Engine

PROJECT RATIONALE

I first became interested in automobile advertising of the 1960s when I ran across a number of ads at an auto show I went to in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As I researched further, I found that Pontiac had taken a novel approach in its development of advertising in that they had hired professional artists of note to create these advertisements. So I started collecting the ads and the sales brochures, concentrating of course on the venerable Pontiac GTO, since I could not afford to buy an actual car.

I didn’t realize that there was a way to combine my interest in these ads and to make them into a scholarly historical study until I took this class and discovered CNMH’s interactive section entitled “Advertisements Online” (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/Ads/online.html ). Here they laid out a way to study advertisements via a website, what kinds of questions to ask, how to determine what motivated the creators and what the ads say about their target audience and what they may say about the popular culture of that time period. My proposal then would be guided by the suggestions expressed in the CNMH’s website.

Traditional business histories have been done primarily using archives of whatever corporation was under study or from collections at research libraries, as is true with the study of most of the fields of history. Scholars, however, are no longer bound by examining only paper documents. Cultural histories have expanded their source base to include a number of other types of sources, including images and artifacts produced by the culture or society under study. Since this website will be a dual-effort study, that is, it will use the tenets of traditional history along with those of cultural studies, using a variety of source types. What better way to cover all of the varied sources, including large numbers of images, available than to publish them to a website?

Coming to grips with automobile manufacturing, advertising and sales is a must to understand the full impact of this industry on the country’s economy and popular culture. In the 1960s we saw the rise in popularity of the muscle car while in the 1970s fuel economy became a concern and hence the public’s automobile appetite changed. In the 1980s it was the minivan that dominated the market place while the 1990s saw the rise of the Sport Utility Vehicle. Who knows where the market will lead from here on out.

There have been a few studies that have tackled the subject of automobile advertising and its interaction with the popular culture of the time as well as its influence on automobile manufacturing and creating a “desire” for a particular type of automobile. Pamela Laird wrote an article “The Car Without a Single Weakness” and she describes the changing nature of automobile advertising from the turn of the twentieth century through the Great Depression (Pamela Walker Laird, "'The Car Without A Single Weakness': Early Automobile Advertising," Technology and Culture, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October, 1996), pp. 796-812. ) She describes nine ads, all included as illustrations but was limited in the number of ads she could publish in print. Being able to add as many ads as she would have liked would have only strengthened her argument, but the limitations of print kept her from taking this course.

Since advertisements make up a crucial aspect of my arguments that the young executives at Pontiac purposefully and surreptitiously carried out an inventive ad campaign, circumventing the staid corporate GM management, and to include all of the ads necessary to prove my point would not work in print, I am left with the thought that the only viable option is to publish to the web. This project would be well served by publishing it to a website as it will use dozens of color and black-and-white images and TV advertisements, artifacts that would make it prohibitively expensive to use in a standard print publication. Benefits of publication to a web would also include building an accessible and searchable archive-database that a visitor could explore at will – a feature not easily duplicated in print.

The very nature of my sources and of my argument would be well-served through an electronic medium. Hopefully the use of a wide variety of types of sources would only strengthen my arguments and add interest to a subject that has been woefully under-studied.

SITE REVIEW

There are a number of innovative websites that mirror what I hope to accomplish with my website. While most of the advertising databases-archives, and there are many, that I will review here cover larger subjects or greater time periods than I have chosen to do, I would nevertheless borrow ideas of layout and presentation from many. There are also a number of illustrated narrative essays that I would follow in form for my essay. The sites I reviewed for my project include the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, The Showroom of Automotive History, the Center for Interactive Advertising’s Volkswagen Gallery, The Walter P. Chrysler Museum’s Chrysler Heritage site, the Library of Congress’ “Posters from the WPA” site, The Commercial Closet, Richard Wright’s illustrated web-essay on automobile advertising in the 1940s and 1950s. Each of the mentioned websites does an admirable job of covering their subjects

For my advertising database, there are a number of examples that I have examined and chosen to review. Ultimately, of course, I hoped to gain some idea of what is possible in an ad database and I also hoped to find ideas about layout that I could “borrow” from. There was only one website that I could find that ventured into the territory I wanted to cover, namely, automobile advertising that contained anything close to an interpretation or that presented an argument. It was a website, the Center for Interactive Advertising’s Volkswagen Gallery (http://www.ciadvertising.org/student_account/spring_01/adv382j/ifsg336/the_60's.htm ) dedicated to ad designer Helmut Krone of the Doyle, Dane & Bernbach advertising agency, and it had a section on his work with the Volkswagen Beetle.

This was an interesting website overall, simple and well laid out, in fact, it was “cool.” It was an archive of ads developed by Mr. Krone and was not exclusively about his VW ad campaign but also included his work with Avis. Navigating through the site was simple, with an index on the left border with links to short narrative essays and then galleries that contained small jpegs of the various advertisements in question. There was no new media in this site.

In their exploration of the VW ads they focus on what was at the time a truly novel advertising campaign that played on the uniqueness of the Beetle. My site would closely mirror this aspect of the Volkswagen Gallery. An important difference between my site and this one, however, is that the VW corporate management approved this ad campaign whereas Pontiac’s ad agency snuck through their unique GTO ads, under the corporate “noses” of GM, to reach their target audience.

The site contained a brief narrative with limited illustrations and the ad “gallery” displayed a total of eight of Krone’s unique ads. Unfortunately only the first ad is presented in sufficient size to read the ad’s copy narrative, the other seven are simply small jpegs and the visitor cannot read the copy; you only see the ad’s main illustration. Although, in a way, the ads speak for themselves, I would hope to add a brief interpretive caption to each ad in my database. Ultimately this section of their website could have been done in print with little effort. The site also only covers a representative sample of VW ads but not a full run, which I would hope that my database would be similar in form and design. Otherwise, though, this is a unique and worthy website that I would use some elements of in mine.

The Henry Ford Museum’s “Showroom of Automotive History” is an interesting site as well (http:// http://www.thehenryford.org/exhibits/showroom/featured.html). They have a limited collection of what they call “Featured Automobiles” that covers a single year for six different types of automobiles: the 1896 Quadricycle, the 1896 Duryea, the Model T, the 1932 Ford V8, the 1936-37 Cord, the 1948 Tucker, the 1949 Ford, the 1965 Mustang, and the 1986 Ford Taurus. Clicking on one of these, the visitor is taken to a well laid out page that presents a number of choices. There is a narrative history and links to pages of photos of the car, specifications, advertising and another on sales literature. The latter two were of special interest and would be an important part of my database. They used a table with three rows and three columns with a small icon in the center of each cell that the visitor may click on. I would probably set up something similar for my site. Again, a member of the “general public” as well as an automotive scholar would find something of interest here although it is by no means a comprehensive site on automotive history.

The Walter P. Chrylser Museum’s “Chrysler Heritage” site (http://www.chryslerheritage.com/pg500.htm) is another interesting site dedicated to the history of the automobile. In this instance, however, a visitor is overwhelmed with choices, with navigation links littering the index page. It took some time to determine what all was included. It is generally an archive site that covers the Museum’s collection. It includes a chronology-timeline that could prove to be a model for my timeline, and dozens of articles on various aspects of the history of the automobile in general and Chrysler in particular. The majority of the articles and information, however, are presented in “pdf” format, which was a limiting factor in that there was little interaction and no multi-media. Nevertheless their section of the “People” of Chrysler (http://www.chryslerheritage.com/pg500people.htm) was interactive and a model of design. Frustratingly though the back button would not work once the “People” section was accessed. Unfortunately there was no advertising database and the only material listed after using the search function to locate “advertising” within the site were “pdf” articles of which most were simply text without illustrations. As in the Henry Ford Museum site, quite logically, the target audience for this site is the general public or scholars interested in Chrysler and/or the automobile. Overall, it was comprehensive and fairly well designed, as one might expect from a well-funded organization but, in my opinion, the Henry Ford Museum site was the better of the two.

The next site I visited was the Library of Congress’ “By the People – For the People – Posters From the WPA, 1936-1943.” (http://www.loc.gov/ammem/wpaposters/wpahome.html) This site was strictly an archive containing 908 “boldly colored and graphically diverse” posters created by the WPA. There was no interpretation of the individual posters but a narrative essay is included that places these posters and the WPA in historical context. The site design was excellent, navigation straight forward, and contained some new media consisting of interviews with a WPA artist. A visitor could search the site by keyword or browse by subject or artist, a useful function and one that I might borrow for my database. The posters selected for this collection were organized around themes, such as health, travel and World War II. The visitor then clicked on one of the choices and was then presented with examples of posters in small scale, with the only information included with each being the artist’s name, the name of the poster, and accession data. One could click on the individual images to access a version of the poster in higher definition. Overall this proved to be a very interesting website, well designed, logically laid out, and was a pleasure to visit.

The next site I visited was the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History’s “Ad * Access” site. (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/) I had visited this site earlier in the semester during the “Archives/research” assignment and as I noted in the class blog then, it was an “elegant” site. Its purpose is stated in the first line of narrative on their index page. The database contains over 7,000 advertisements from all genres dating from 1911 to 1955. They are divided into five subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II. It was, in fact, not too dissimilar to the Library of Congress’ site, and one could browse at leisure through their advertising database or by subject or search by keyword. As I noted in the blog, “The main index buttons includes links to timelines (not interactive, unfortunately but a minor criticism), a comprehensive search engine, the ad database directly, technological information, and an FAQ. Also included are short historical narratives that can act as a decent guide to the various time periods covered by the database. The timelines also can act as a shorter guide. . .Each of the over 7,000 ads in the database appears first as a large thumbnail with access links to higher resolution jpegs (up to 150 dpi). Each ad page has descriptive listings below the ad itself that list the date of publication, where they appeared, etc. and a list of the various sub-categories of the database the ad appears in. You access each ad from either the browser link or by searching the database.” If given the time, my database would be organized in much the same way and their search engine would be another model. Their section on copyright issues too proved to be of interest and would guide my approach to this issue.

There was also the rather daring website called The Commercial Closet (http://commercialcloset.org), that examines current advertisements to determine if they have a gay content and if so rates them as to being gay friendly, gay neutral, or gay bashing. There is no objectivity here. There is a section for viewer participation and it also includes a description and detailed notation regarding all pertinent background, such as the ad agency that developed the ad, who it was developed for, when it appeared and in what regions of the country/world, and who its target audience was. Here is the limit of information that I could possibly include in my database. The site was well laid out and highly interactive. I would hope to add this much detail to each of my ads, but I’m not sure if I would have the time in one semester to add that much information!

Jim Wangers, the advertising executive who played an integral part of developing the GTO ad campaign, has his own website (http://www.jimwangers.com/homepage.html). I add it here because I have attempted to contact him via email and by letter (but have not heard back from him yet). The site is a Flash-based site that takes the visitor on a trip through what he called the “Wide Track” era, which was a Pontiac advertising campaign that pre-dated the GTO—it referred to a technological innovation that Pontiac developed (and is one of the points of my arguments regarding U.S. auto manufacturers and technological innovation in the 1950s and 1960s) – whereby Pontiac created a series of cars that were wider and longer than their competition and this made for a more stable and comfortable ride. The website is a promotional advertisement for his new book but also contains a great deal of information regarding Pontiac during the 1959 to 1969 time period. It follows a couple as they travel to a Pontiac dealership in 1969 to buy a GTO and then go on a bit of a history trip from 1959 back to 1969. It’s a bit on the campy side (I definitely would not include a running soundtrack on my site as he does but that’s a matter of opinion) but the site does cover the era through Mr. Wangers’ eyes and is therefore of interest. Automotive and advertising historians would find it as a valuable resource as would anyone interested in cars of this period.

The final database/archive I visited was one constructed by a muscle car enthusiast: the “Muscle Car Club” (http://www.musclecarclub.com/). This site was elegant in its simplicity and was well designed and easy to navigate. It contained a wealth of objective information and illustrations and was free of any academic pretensions. If one wanted to get the straight scoop on the performance, specifications, sales figures, options, photographs and even some advertisements of any muscle car of the 1960s and early 1970s, this would be the place to start.

Professor Richard Wright’s illustrated narrative for “Detroit News” on a new exhibit at the Detroit Public Library on automotive artwork and its impact on the auto industry in the post-World War II years. Produced in color, the ads he used to illustrate his article add a stimulating look and feel to what otherwise would be a straight narrative. I corresponded with Professor Wright via email and asked him about working in an electronic format and asked him about the pitfalls, difficulties and benefits of this medium. He noted it was fairly easy when you have the assistance of the Detroit News, where he had worked as the automotive editor before accepting a position at Wayne State as an Assistant Professor of Journalism. He is also the author of an “E-book,”: West of Laramie – A Brief History of the Auto Industry”; published by Wayne State University Press (http://www.laramie.willshireltd.com/Contents.html).

Of interest is this passage on the use of his book:

“Richard A. Wright owns the copyright to West of Laramie, but it may be used in whole or in part without payment. Jenny King owns the photographs and gives permission for their use. We ask only that you let them know if you have used all or any part of the book by emailing them at Wayne State University.”

In his reply to me, he noted that “I found that working in the field of automotive history on the Internet was a very reasonable and useful approach. Your project sounds very feasible. Good luck with it.” Brief, perhaps, but to the point!

Overall, these websites were all well designed, with excellent navigation, source material, content and presentation. To conclude, I would combine some factors of each of these websites for my proposal. Specifically, I would use the ad format of the Commercial Closet, Showroom of Automotive History, WPA and Ad*Access sites for my advertising database. I would borrow heavily from the sections on advertising and sales literature within the latter site as well but I would also add a hotlink over each photo such as used on the CNMH’s ad website that opens a window over specific sections of the ad to highlight some point germane to the author’s argument (if I can get some technical help in using Flash and any other relevant software). I would also use select examples from the database to illustrate my narrative, having hotlinks from the illustrations used in my narrative back to the ad database so that a reader could go between the narrative and the ad database to gather more information about that particular ad. My narrative section, which would contain my arguments, would be based on Richard Wright’s illustrated narrative. My timeline would be based in part on the timeline within the Walter P. Chrylser Museum’s “Chrysler Heritage” site but would contain hotlinks to other material, primarily the images of individual ads, sales brochures, or order forms.

TECHNICAL PLAN

As a reluctant Luddite this aspect of the project’s development is the most complicated for me. Undoubtedly, I would need to rely on advice and assistance from those who are technologically proficient than I am. But I will make the following observations regarding the technical aspects of this web proposal to get the ball rolling.

My proposed project is perfectly suited to a web-based presentation. Combining visual artifacts in the form of the print ads and sales brochures used to sell the GTO to the public, along with some TV spots, a narrative essay that would be the “core” of the project, along with an interactive (and objective) timeline, the GTO project would show the importance of the rise of this type of automobile at this particular juncture in U.S. history. It would be nearly impossible and definitely cost prohibitive to attempt this project strictly in print. With the advantages offered by the web, however, this unique project is quite feasible.

I would use these ads to illustrate my narrative, having hotlinks from the illustrations used in my narrative so that a reader could go between the narrative and the ad database to gather more information about that particular ad. I’m not sure if I would have the time in a single semester to add the following but I believe it would be a welcome addition to the project. Next I would like to develop an interactive timeline. The timeline would be broken up into “model years” that would have links to the ads and sales literature used for that year, the order forms that show just how a buyer could literally build a car to suit his/her individual tastes (even though it was a mass produced car built on an assembly line the amount of choice available to the individual buyer contradicts many historians’ assertions that the auto industry was producing featureless junk at this time), a breakdown of sales figures and information about the buyers themselves. To fulfill Dr. Paula Petrik’s suggestions, I would also include ads from competing auto companies as well as information on this competition, which cars, differences between them, etc. I would also include multi-media clips of TV ads for various muscle cars, including the Paul Revere and the Raiders singing the praises of the GTO Judge model – a type of GTO that came about because of the TV show “Laugh-In.” (http://www.bedazzled.blogs.com/bedazzled/2005/10/the_judge_tv_co.html)

I will be guided by the advice given by Robin Williams and John Tollett as well as the lessons we have covered in class this semester. Williams and Tollett wrote that with regards to navigation design “’clear’ and ‘simple’ should be your goals.” (Robin Williams and John Tollett, The Non-Designer's Web Book, 2nd edition (Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press), p. 132.) The layout as I described follows a strictly linear path and each section of this proposed website is clearly marked. Hopefully with this simple design I can avoid the pitfalls of having the site appear differently depending on the type of computer and browser a viewer may use, as noted by Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen in their "Doing Digital History." (http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/designing/1.php) The colors I have used for the background of the left indexes is a problem discussed in that article as well since I am not sure if all browsers would show these colors as I intended them to look. As I mentioned earlier, it is with issues such as these that I would need to guidance of a more experienced web designer.

The tools I will use include a Powerspec 520 personal computer. I will scan those images that are not currently available in an electronic format with a Hewlett Packard Scanjet 4C using HP Deskscan II software. All images would be scanned in at least two density levels, 75 dpi and the large-scale format ads at 300 dpi, which is adequate for print publishing if needed and both would be in “jpeg” format. The images would be prepared using Adobe Photoshop 5.5 as well as Microsoft Office’s Photo Editor for small scale editing changes. I would also look into getting technical assistance to see if perhaps I could add some kind of hot spot (using Flash?) on some of the ads to highlight those areas that I would mention in the text of my narrative. The website itself would be built/written using Dreamweaver MX. I would also take into account Rosenzweig's and Cohen's suggestion that a website be accessible to persons with disabilities, including adding "alt" tags to each image. As for the database itself, I would explore using using open source database software that is available, such as MySQL, but as I have no experience with building databases I would need assistance. In the interim, I have added a sample database entry using standard html coding.

I learned a long time ago that when undertaking an automobile restoration project that one needed to develop a comprehensive list of all the parts one would need, along with a work plan containing all of the work needed down to the last bolt. Then you had to add up the costs of all of the replacement parts and how much shop time the car would need for required body and paint work as well as any mechanical help. Once you figured out your costs to the penny and your time to the minute, and you were confident your calculations were accurate, then all one needed to do to be totally accurate was to double both figures. This then would give you an accurate idea of the costs the project would entail. I have a feeling the same would apply here but nevertheless I am confident that I could build this website as I have laid it out here during a single semester. The costs involved, not including labor, are within reason as well.

END