For my project I have been toying with the idea of making a blog about the wilderness areas in Utah. I'm not sure if this is still what I'm going to do, but I think it might be somewhat interesting. The site I looked at was wilderness.org, a site for the The Wilderness Society.
At first glance wilderness.org is a pretty simple site. I have been to it before, and my first impression of it was that it was a pretty simple site dedicated mainly to current events effecting wilderness areas nationally. But when I looked at it for this assignment, and explored the site's hyperlinks I quickly learned that this site is actually a dynamic site.
Wilderness.org implements the use of hyperlinks so that most of the sites content is accessed through hyperlinks. For example if you are reading about wildlife the site will link wildlife to a page that has tips on watching wildlife. This site does stuff like that a lot. Not only does it hyperlink internally, but it also links externally. So if they are discussing say a proposal of the Bureau of Land Management's they will actually have a link to the proposal on the blm's own page.
It was fun to look at this site and actually be conscious of the use of hyperlinks, I honestly have to say that if I hadn't done this I wouldn't have been aware of 80% of this sites content--maybe this is a weak point for this site--too much hyperlinks. But when I wised up to what they were doing their site became a lot more interesting and dynamic. I think in the end it works out because they have a huge site, and hyperlinking gives them away to scale their content to specific users by channeling their content into specific pages the user is reading out of their own interest.
I was not creative enough to actually put hyperlinks in my summary about hyperlinks. Nice touch. I think your project will work, you could rely heavily on graphic illustrations of wilderness areas instead of a bunch of text, they say "a picture is worth a thousand words" Maybe your site could be more of a photo gallery. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteHope you decide to stick with the Utah Wilderness theme. I think it will make a cool final project. Great blog post, too--detailed yet to the point.
ReplyDeleteI really think the Utah Wilderness theme would be unique and very interesting. The only photo you have included so far leaves me ready for more. Your description of the site having so much content that it channels users through information interests me. I never thought of a website experience in that way before.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the support! I'm not sure if I will stick with it, I need to look around and see if I will actually be able to work this into the assignment, if not I can always just do it on my own.
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