That way students will always be able to tell where they are. If they click one of the links that takes them to a different site altogether -- say, to the Library of Congress -- they will instantly know they've left the course site. Again, this small detail dramatically improves ease of reading, the student's comfort level and therefore the site's usefulness.

It also seems reasonable to ask that a web site's design harmonize with its content and with the message it tries to convey. This example, a site devoted to reminiscences by Vietnam vets, can serve as a model of how to integrate your intentions with your design. The site attempts to recall the experience of war by posting a large graphic of the Vietnam War ribbon. It's a good project and reasonably well executed. But it could be much more effective. First, the over-large graphic shouts painfully, with its garish colors. The display font, showing the word "narratives," is an old English style -- why? Probably because the page's designer had it on his computer. Are we talking about Vietnam, or is the page making some comparison of soldiers to knights in armor? It's thematically inconsistent with the page's subject matter, and so distracting. The page follows with a list of veterans who have contributed their stories, each preceded by a clip-art sphere graphic which only makes the page busy and crowded. The sphere graphics add a note of whimsy, or rather many notes of whimsy, again inconsistent with the subject matter. The background, while not too busy, appears to have nothing to do with the subject either, unless the Army was using parchment in Vietnam. The site has sent a very confused and inconsistent message, like a student paper with too many subjects.

Click on the story entitled "Medic." Are we still at the same site, or is this a page maintained by the author of "medic"? The background has inexplicably changed to some sort of papery business, and the type has leaped into boldface. As a general rule, lots of text in bold makes the reader feel shouted at and understandably tired. If the story is good it speaks for itself. The page ends with a jumble of mismatched graphics which draw the eye, tired from all that shouting, away from the text, only to annoy it further with the fact that the graphics are not consistent with the site's theme or tone and represent overkill. Is it really necessary, for example, to have a graphic that includes the words "send e-mail" and the words "click here to email" and a picture of a flying letter? Each new graphic also adds to the page's download time, further annoying the reader, who may very well be a student seeking any excuse to dodge the assignment. While there is some attempt to maintain continuity and consistency in this site, a few simple principles can make the site much better.

The redesign tries to be consistent to the subject -- the historical recollections of Vietnam vets -- while staying faithful to the original. The battle ribbon is included, only this time faded, as if by age, and reduced in size so it's less garish. The display font has been changed from old English to a typewriter-style font, since typewriters were in use at the time and the page's subject is the documentary history of Vietnam. The text font has been changed from the default font (Arial) to Courier, another typewriter-style font, eliminating jarring changes of type. The pointless ball graphics are gone to clip-art hell, and the reduction in the number and size of graphics focuses attention where it should be -- on the contributors' words. To make the page easier to navigate, the links are now red. And the red links further recall the historical theme, since as many of us remember, typewriters often included a red ribbon for emphasis. Click on "Medic" and you can see a header, reminding readers that they haven't left the site, and a simple page with a plain background. The story no longer has to shout down the background, and the jumble of graphics has been streamlined and cleaned up. This simple redesign makes no claims to great art. But it does make for a much better page. It adheres to a few simple rules, and attempts to build a congruence between the subject matter and the appearance of the site.

Another example appears here. The site for this course, on Jacksonian America, tries to recreate some of the design conventions of the historical period it treats. It has a consistent look and feel, a consistent header, and the colors -- a strong red white and blue -- were chosen to reflect the overheated nationalism of the era. But beyond this, the page was designed to convey the instructor's approach and intent. The splash page, an altered reproduction of an antebellum handbill, deliberately encourages exploration. Rather than saying "click here" it tries to convey some of the philosophy of history informing the course. We focused on the lives of ordinary people and on popular culture as well as on the lives of the great, and spent a great deal of time on the emerging market culture of hype and false appearance. I hoped to merge the design of the site with the idea that historical insight comes from the mundane, from the unexpected, and from the thoughtful exercise of curiosity on mass media and popular subjects. Not merely decorative, the splash page sets a tone for the course.

Click on the word "syllabus," and the course is organized into "places." Click on "the factory," then again on the image of the Lowell, Massachusetts mills, and you can see an attempt to use the web to teach students how to "read" a photograph. Similarly, click on the link for "five points" and then on the link for "Barnum's Museum." You can do a brief exploration of this famous attraction and some of the curiosities it contained. The course is neither original nor unique, nor is the website some sort of breakthrough in design or execution, But it is an attempt to make the design harmonize with the content. The course website, ideally, encouraged a less hierarchical organization of knowledge.

The Web's theorists imagined lack of hierarchy as one of its greatest features. The Web would, they thought, break down old barriers to communication and knowledge. But as professors we are in the hierarchy business -- having trained ourselves to scale the academic hierarchy, we now man (or woman) its gates. Most of the typical academic websites -- the bulletin board sites, the reserve room sites, or the encyclopedia sites -- maintain traditional hierarchies of knowledge. The best, or at least most novel, designs for academic web sites try to make use of this non-hierarchical character, and integrate it.

" Magic Illusion and Detection at the Turn of the Century" focuses almost entirely on an elaborate website. The course centers on a contradictory tendency in American life. On the one hand, Americans believe that "anyone can be whatever they want" -- that we're all free to remake ourselves in the marketplace. But at the same time, Americans were strongly drawn to subjects and practices, like criminology, psychiatry, handwriting analysis, or racial theory that promised to show who someone "really was." The detective story is a perfect example, and serves as the central idea of the course. Detective stories -- think of Sherlock Holmes -- generally involve a hero or heroine who can pass as someone else in order to sort out who other people really are.

The website takes the form of an immersive simulation, a virtual world. Organized into four "sites" -- a newsstand, a saloon, a movie theater, and a police station -- it tries to convey a sense of mystery, and to encourage students to replicate the detective process. The interface is almost always black, dark, and even a little creepy. The graphics are generally scanned archival photographs, digitally altered to convey this sense of mystery. Some historians might argue that this represents an unacceptable alteration of historical fact, but I would argue that the alteration constitutes an interpretation. Just as, in an article or book, we take an artifact out of its context and place it in one of our own making, in this course the graphics are placed in the thematic context the course explores. In that sense the graphics have become an integral part of the course's overall argument and content.

The enigmatic quality of the site forces students into a more free-form mode of inquiry, and presents them with multiple paths to explore, while conveying the sense that history can be like detective work. It contains a large number of primary historical sources, including movies, and in that sense it replicates the bulletin board model. But it also includes a game-like problem for the final paper assignment. In that assignment, students were asked to find a "confidence man," a character who would make them a proposition. They would then have to assess the character's reliability, using the resources available at the time. Eventually, they will find the character in a book of "mug shots" in the police station. The site encourages playful exploration rather than navigation through a hierarchy of knowledge, and it does it by integrating design, theme, and the technical capacities of the web.

Predictably, and understandably, more adventurous and self-motivated students loved the course, while others found the course's willful obscurity frustrating. But on the whole the papers for this class were the best I have ever received. The vast majority of the students opted to take on a fictional persona, and write the final paper "in character." I stressed in class that they absolutely had to adhere to the conventions of historical writing in terms of thesis and evidence, and most of the students responded with enthusiasm. They worked very hard to frame the people they encountered in the context of the times -- to understand them in their own terms, rather than imposing the present on their subjects. Even better, they were clearly grasping how historians construct a plausible narrative of events out of what fragmentary clues the evidence presents. Teacher evaluations for this course were among the highest I've ever received.

 

This course represents an extreme in many ways, not the least of which was the amount of time it took to make the website. The site evolved over two years of part-time work, approximately five hours a week, initially from a modest collection of materials and no photographic images. A $3000 grant from George Mason University's College of Arts and Sciences brought a course reduction and a graduate assistant who helped with some of the scanning. I would estimate that the site took an additional two months of full-time work in the summer, with eighty hours of time from the GRA. Some of this time was spent learning how to do basic coding tasks, but new software made this process dramatically simpler. While it makes good use of the web's capacities, it is hardly necessary, however, to go to such extremes to exploit the strengths of the web.

Most of the web material for this course, History 409, "Between the Wars,"consists of primary historical sources posted to the web -- for example, this section on the dustbowl. It also includes some assignments which are designed to make better use of digital media's potential. Historians frequently struggle with students' "presentism." Students have a hard time imagining that people ever thought any differently than they do now. But we often want to convey the idea that "the past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there." The less-structured character of web inquiry can allow students a direct look at just how different the past can be. The short paper assignment for this course asks students to go to a collection of "life histories" of ordinary Americans compiled in the 1930s. The full text of the collection, now online at the Library of Congress' "American Memory" site, is searchable by word or phrase. This facility was simply impossible before digital media. The assignment asks them to enter any subject that interests them into the "search" box. They quickly find that in the 1930s, phrases like "working out" carried very different meanings than they do today, or that Americans experienced "football" very differently from modern fans. They have to reconfigure their own thinking, and enter the mental world of the 1930s. This simple assignment begins taking students away from the model of the reserve room and towards a more thorough exploration of what digital media, and the web, can do.

Although the web has many novel features, you can choose to minimize that novelty by borrowing from the traditions of print. Simple is nearly always better, but the "default" form web pages take -- no margins, gray backgrounds, and random link colors -- go beyond simple and into crude. It's terrible to work with. Adding margins, brightening the background, minimizing changes in font, and eliminating spurious graphics all add to the page's legibility and the student's comfort level. Your site should have a consistent look and feel, so the user always knows where he or she is. A header can accomplish this easily, and it's a good idea to begin any new website with a template, a standard frame to which you can add text.

More importantly, because the forms of academic communication on the web remain unstandardized, we need to give special attention to design. Few academics have any training in design, and many have a Puritan suspicion that ornament is the first step towards pleasure. But an effective website must convey a unified thesis or theme. Just as a paper, speech or book must be focused, organized and must eliminate distractions, so a web site should have an ideological and visual coherence. All its elements should strengthen the message the course seeks to convey. We would not accept a paper lacking a clear and consistent thesis, sprawling with pointless digressions and substituting decorative flourishes for content. Neither should we accept (or create) websites with incoherent, inconsistent visual organization, pointless links and meaningless decorative doodles. Doing web assignments well requires thinking about things we normally have the luxury of enjoying without conscious thought, like the design and overall conception of a book. But it puts us in a position of potential creativity, in an exciting time when we have the chance to redefine how we do what we do.