General principles for designing a historical website
How web design differs from print design
The formatting of text for different genres of sites
Methods for sizing and laying out images
The presentation of audio and video
Proper site structure and navigation
Issues related to accessibility, and how they apply to your project
ven before you have finished digitizing the material you will need for your website, you will need to begin thinking about the site’s design. At this point most historians once again face unfamiliar territory. But if historians typically have few preconceived notions about server set up or audio sampling rates, many hold firm opinions about web design. Users of the web encounter attractive and functional sites, and awkward and unfriendly pages, all the time, and each of us is confident we know the difference between good and bad design and that everyone else is wrong about such things. People who would rarely venture precise aesthetic commentaries about paintings in a museum nevertheless tend to have strong opinions about the layout, colors, fonts, and other design elements of a website—and of all websites. In no other medium has David Hume’s dictum perhaps rung truer, that “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
With these myriad viewpoints, web design has become highly contested and occasionally belligerent. Because the Internet is still in its infancy compared to other media that historians use, few conventions have arisen, yet everyone seems to know where true perfection lies. In addition, the pull of commercial designers has been strong across the web.
Few books discuss academic web design, as opposed to commercial web design, and some would even say that separate guides are unnecessary. In light of this situation, we should remember that the self-declared gurus have been working in a medium that is barely a decade old and that has constantly changed in this incredibly brief time span. It seems a little unreasonable for a science (or a philosophy or an art) of web aesthetics to arise in such a short period of time.
This, of course, has not stopped anyone from making sure proclamations, and sometimes good business, out of web design. Listening to various schools of thought and companies involved with web design is important, if only momentarily and if only to gain some insight into what might be relevant to historical work on the web.
Proponents of usability have provided web designers with a better sense of how actual human beings (instead of the human beings we envision—who are, naturally, all like ourselves) use the web. Like the economists who have approached their discipline’s notion of “rational choice” (that human beings always make sane, calculated choices about money, prices, and major life decisions) with skepticism, usability consultants such as Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug have made important discoveries about the quite odd ways people approach a web page that historians looking to use the web without frustrating their audience should note and consider. As these consultants highlight, most visitors to most websites do not take the time to look at every part of a web page with the same attention that their authors took in designing them. Hand constantly on the mouse, with an itchy trigger finger, the average web surfer often clicks on decent rather than optimal links to see if they will find what they are looking for. Sometimes coming to a web page directly from another site (rather than the parent site’s home page), the surfer engages in disoriented stumbling rather than rational, linear touring. Words that seem clear to the web designer can be confusing to most web visitors. If a website is a tool, Nielsen and Krug tell us, then we want it to be as usable as possible, and good design helps to achieve that important goal.
