Making a Good Site Better

.01. INTRODUCTION

"Exploring Ancient World Cultures: An Introduction to Ancient World Cultures on the World-Wide Web" (hereinafter referred to as "The EAWC site") may be found at http://eawc.evansville.edu/index.htm. The EAWC site is directed by Anthony F. Beavers and hosted by the University of Evansville.

As the EAWC's introduction explains, the site "is an on-line course supplement for students and teachers of the ancient and medieval worlds. It features its own essays and primary texts." The essays' vocabulary and the nuances of the writing suggest that the site was created for students at about the freshmen level of college, though the brevity and clarity of the writing make the site approachable for students at the high school level as well.

The EAWC site has been widely recognized as an excellent Internet-based resource and has won numerous awards. While there is praise for the site to be found in this article, the focus here is on perceived weaknesses in the site. Such an approach would seem to invite two related questions. 1) Why not simply address these comments to the editors of the site in a personal correspondence? 2) How are criticisms of a particular web site of interest to a wider audience? In response to both questions is the suggestion that by examining the shortcomings of even a strong web site, all of us who create historical web sites gain a heightened awareness of some pitfalls that come with the enterprise.

.02. SITE ANALYSIS

The EAWC site begins beautifully. The homepage contains a compelling essay by Bill Hemminger, "Why Study Ancient World Cultures?" The essay raises provocative questions that grab the reader's attention, something the nine subsidiary essays on the site also do with skill. These nine essays form the skeleton of the site. One of the essays is dedicated to the ancient Near East, one to ancient India, one to ancient Egypt, one to ancient China, one to ancient Greece, one to ancient Rome, one to Early Islam, one to Medieval Europe, and one, a conclusion, to how these various strands of history fit together.

Each of the eight essays on historical civilizations raises thought-provoking questions about some of the textual primary sources of the civilization, and then the page on which it is contained provides hyperlinks to carefully selected textual primary sources. The page on ancient China, for instance, includes links to excerpts from two dynamic textual primary sources, The Analects of Confucius and Sun-Tzu's The Art of War.

While the essays on historical civilizations address many of the textual primary sources to which they provide hyperlinks, they generally do not address all the textual primary sources linked to from the page dedicated to that civilization. For example, the essay on ancient China focuses entirely on The Tao Te Ching, but makes no mention of the two primary textual sources highlighted on the page, The Analects of Confucius or Sun-Tzu's The Art of War. Similarly, the page on the ancient Near East provides a hyperlink to the Code of Hammurabi, but provides no historical context for the Code nor any questions to guide one's reading of the Code. Such omissions leave the reader unsure how to use the materials linked to from the web site.

In addition to linking to textual primary sources, each of the eight pages on historical civilizations contains one hyperlink to visual images produced by each civilization and one hyperlink to the time frame of each civilization. The images linked to often do pretty well at spanning the chronology of each civilization, but beyond that they are fairly random, failing either to develop a single historical theme visually or to provide much of a cross-representation of different historical themes. The visual images linked to for the middle ages provide a case-and-point. The dates obtained by following the chronology hyperlink for each civilization are even more haphazard. Most of the dates linked to note that such and such a cultural artifact was created at such and such a time, but these dates do not give an overall sense of chronological change.

The haphazardness in the selection of chronological and visual materials rises from the editors' apparent over-reliance on the Argos Project, defined in the introduction as "an Internet search engine that limits the range of its responses to ancient and medieval resources." The editors have allowed the Argos Project to determine the content for the "chronology" and "images" links for each civilization. The use of the search engine to determine content makes the EAWC site rather disorienting. On the one hand, the user gets led by the editors' considered choices as to which textual primary sources are most important and gets pointers as to how some of those primary sources might be approached. On the other hand, the EAWC site essentially sets the user loose to browse a smattering of visual primary sources and then drowns the user in a flood of dates. A fundamental lesson to be learned here may be the importance of consistency in treatment of different subjects. If one is making editorial decisions about — and authoring original introductions to — one type of sources such as textual ones, the online user may be quite disorientated when similar editorial decisions and original introductions do not accompany other types of sources such as visual ones.

.03. CONCLUSION

The shortcomings of the EAWC site identified in this article revolve around the editors' choices as to what to include in the way of historical introductions to each civilization, the dearth of background materials on visual and textual primary sources, and the means by which materials for the chronology and images hyperlinks were selected. It would be terrific to see the editors of EAWC address these concerns; to have their insight into what chronological events and visual images are most poignant and to have their guidance as to how those events and sources might be approached, much as they have done for many of the textual primary sources highlighted on the site. Regardless of what modifications the editors make to the EAWC site, the EAWC site in its present form may be instructive to all of us seeking to create sound historical web sites ourselves.