My reading of fellow classmates' blogs as well as my own experience with The Lost Museum has led me to question the significance of all the bells and whistles involved in designing a website, particularly a history website. On the one hand, there is an overwhelming need to make the website look as professional and scholarly as possible. For one, your work is on display for the entire world to see, while it may be confusing for some, the complexity and skill involved in creating such a page is not lost on any audience. This makes me think that there are two underlying motives involved when designing such a site.
1.) To effectively relay historic information in an entertaining way for the general public as well as a targeted audience.
2.) To display the complexity and skill required to build such a site from scratch.
My question after reading the previously mentioned blogs and visiting this website is, is it possible to do both at the same time?
After a few weeks into this class I found myself looking at non-intuitive websites admiring the complexity behind all of the bells and whistles that were included however irrelevant they were. Wheras other websites I've breezed through I almost found myself dissapointed by their simplicity.
A question we must all ask ourselves before even beginning to design a website is "What are we doing this for? What message to we want to convey to the general public?" For some it will be the most important to display everything they know about CSS and photoshop afterall our final will be an excellent portfolio for future employers. For others, the emphasis might be on how appealing you can make your subject to the general public. I believe we are each doing a little bit of both.
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