I'd Design a Website, but Google Made Me Stupid.

This week Cohen and Rozenweig drilled down into the importance of website design, insisting that “[p]eople … tend to have strong opinions about the layout, colors, fonts, and other design elements of a website—and of all websites.”  The point is to balance form and function.  It should be attractive, but has to be usable as well.  While there is no established canon as such, the authors offer some helpful conventions for backgrounds, print, images and video.

Here is a shining example from this week’s work.

Here is a horrendous example, taken from (embarrassingly) my alma mater’s website.

The contrast (no pun intended) is clear.  Certainly there are issues of budget and expertise involved; AASU is not Harvard, after all, but AASU’s site violates just about every one of the basics.  No worries.  I know the IT guy there.

Importantly, Cohen and Rozenweig don’t stop at the technical stuff.  After you build the website, then it’s about "Building an Audience."  This is not necessarily intuitive, and they give practical suggestions. They encourage paying attention to blogs, getting involved in online communities, asking for links to others’ websites, and being thoughtful and intentional about facilitating return traffic.  Interestingly, they critically assess the value of the typical metrics (hits and page views, for example), insisting that they don’t tell us as much as we think they do.  Instead, they suggest that requested pages, referrers, browsers and operating systems, and traffic patterns yield more useful information in terms of how people are actually using your website.

Next on the list was a helpful compendium of digital archives where, after digging around awhile, I found the two examples above.  The Harvard page is, incidentally, fascinating.  Click “browse” and take a look at all the great stuff!  I spent a couple of hours immersed in Lyman Beecher’s autobiography and correspondence, something I needed for a project I’m working on.

Is Google changing the way we read?

And then there’s Google.  Cohen’s article “Is Google Good for History” contrasts neatly with Nunberg’s “Google Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars.”  Where Cohen answers the question “yes,” Cohen questions whether we have any “assurances … that Google will do this right?”  Nunberg goes on to point out ubiquitous Google errors, particularly in metadata.  Here Nunberg overlaps with Miller’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in which Miller posits that the Internet is changing the way we read, reprogramming us to scan pages for data rather than read deeply for content and connection.  Both Miller and Nunberg chide Google for treating books as electronic objects containing information.  They don’t approach books the way a historian would.  Does this surprise anyone?  Does anyone approach a book like a historian does?  Most irritating of all was the keening sense of entitlement, which assumes that Google should tailor their process to our needs instead of theirs.  The thing is, Google paid for it, so Google gets to do it their way.  A number of the comments reflect this same irritation.

The two classes on using Google Search more effectively were illuminating.  I knew many of the commands, (define:, Ctrl-f, “-,” and quotes of course), but I did not know “filetype:,” “intitle,” “site:,” or lots of others.  Dan Russell’s solution to a seemingly impossible problem by employing good search techniques on Google products was astounding.  Russell also gives some great suggestions on improving Google Search results in Todesco’s article, “How to Solve Impossible Problems.”

The “Historical” sites (Cleveland, New Orleans, and Spokane) were great.  I dug into Spokane Historical, of course, and found Polly Judd Park, where I take my kids all the time!  It’s a two-minute walk from my house.  Who knew it was “historical”?