http://jbirdhistory.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/stop-trying-so-hard/ ...Hopefully Sat, 10 May 2008 01:20:50 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 http://jbirdhistory.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/stop-trying-so-hard/#comment-34 Kira Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:36:05 +0000 http://jbirdhistory.wordpress.com/?p=61#comment-34 I agree that, as historians, our main job is to get the point across to our audience as accurately as possible. However, if we were to throw design totally out the window and leave ourselves with simplistic websites made of a list of links and text that are one color, and a background that is another, and that's it, then we would completely be ignoring everything we learned in our first week of readings. Like Donald Norman said, attractive things work better. People, even scholars, have a tendency to judge a website on its looks first. Even an avid scholar doesn't want to read the most well-written research on a plain background. I personally think that a plain site is just as distracting as one with a ton of ads. A plain site makes me want to skim over the information as quickly as possible in order to move on to something better, which increases the likelihood of missing some important information. I agree that we should not muddle our sites with too many distractions, but I think what a website offers that a paper doesn't is the ability to incorporate multimedia that will educate <em>and</em> engage your audience. I agree that, as historians, our main job is to get the point across to our audience as accurately as possible. However, if we were to throw design totally out the window and leave ourselves with simplistic websites made of a list of links and text that are one color, and a background that is another, and that’s it, then we would completely be ignoring everything we learned in our first week of readings. Like Donald Norman said, attractive things work better. People, even scholars, have a tendency to judge a website on its looks first. Even an avid scholar doesn’t want to read the most well-written research on a plain background. I personally think that a plain site is just as distracting as one with a ton of ads. A plain site makes me want to skim over the information as quickly as possible in order to move on to something better, which increases the likelihood of missing some important information. I agree that we should not muddle our sites with too many distractions, but I think what a website offers that a paper doesn’t is the ability to incorporate multimedia that will educate and engage your audience.

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