The group project that I am a part of deals with mass graves resulting from atrocities committed during WWII as well as the memorialization of such atrocities. SO the website I will be evaluating based on my group's rubric is this: http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/index.html. This site is titled "Lesser-Known Facts of WWII" and it has a large section dedicated to the atrocities of WWII. For some sections I won't evaluate it completely based off our rubric because the rubric was created for an academic, archaeological project and therefore includes sections geared toward this (I will, for instance, not evaluate it based on method/approach because its approach is completely different than the one we need to take for our project and I will ignore the "research questions" part of our rubric because this site isn't about answering specific questions, it's about presenting general information).
In terms of organization presentation, I would classify this site as "Poor". The full site menu does not appear at the top but rather appears at the bottom of the home page, which takes a while to get to as there is a lot of information on the home page. The overall layout doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This all makes it somewhat difficult to navigate and means that information can be difficult to locate. The site, overall, is just not visually/aesthetically appealing -- too many different colours are used for text, there is no balance between images and text (way too much text for the sparse amount of images), and the site just looks outdated.
In terms of sources, I would also give this site a "Poor" because it doesn't give any. Forget thinking about the scholarly integrity of any sources because this is impossible to assess when no sources are cited, listed, or referenced in any way (what if you want more information?!).
For content and data I will not assess the site based on our rubric because the site is meant simply to give information to the public, not to assess or analyze it in any sort of academic way. For its own purposes, the site would actually receive an "Excellent" from me in terms of data because there's lots of it, it's interesting, it covers various areas, and it's easy to understand.
Written communication is "Good" -- it's easy to understand and presented fairly well. It doesn't flow particularly well though and contains some obvious mistakes.
Overall, this website is certainly interesting and thorough, but it is not an especially good website. It could definitely use a design update and some listed information sources. It's great if you want to learn a lot of simple, lesser-known (and some not so lesser-known) facts about WWII, but if you care about aesthetics at all, I would not recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment