As you can see, I am no expert on websites. I will not pretend to be; you can also see this page, haha. But this is why it’s so helpful to gather inspiration from other websites. For the sake of this post, I will be focusing on two websites, https://newdeal.oucreate.com/index.php, and http://mallhistory.org/.
The https://newdeal.oucreate.com/index.php website is titled “Making Modern America: Discovering the Great Depression and New Deal.” I chose to investigate this website due to the fact that its creators are a group of students from the University of Oklahoma. It clearly advertises how it’s made by students, with an About Page that lists their names. There are a lot of elements in this website, such as different exhibits like Historical Photographs, Historical Documents, and more. Also featured on the front page is the word cloud feature from Omeka that links to the tags on the website. I do not think a feature like this would benefit my group’s project, but it is definitely useful when viewing different collections of exhibits! The website also features useful tools such as an interactive map, which I also do not think would serve my group’s project, but would be very useful for other projects! A critique of this website would probably be the organization of the images. While it is helpful to see the tags and information, I feel as though a gallery display would have been a more aesthetically pleasing way to interact with the site. However, I digress that the amount of contributors could make a system like this easier. I am not even sure if the Omeka system even has a gallery feature in the way that WordPress does.
The website displaying the history of the National Mall is very engaging to look at! It features many different types of exploration, and tools such as interactive maps which really suit a project designed to reflect the history of a particular region. This website looks very professional and exciting, and I believe that my amazing group can create a website that engages viewers at least somewhat as much as this website does. I had a lot of fun viewing this website, especially the exploration page. I kept exploring around the page for fun and almost forgot to complete this blog post. Instead of the slightly cluttered setup of the Oklahoma site, this website had a very suffice design. (Nothing against the Oklahoma students, though! They did great work and should be proud!)
