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How to Create a Historical Web Site

What is a Historical Web Site?

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A historical web site is a collection of web pages, interconnected with hyperlinks, that presents primary and secondary sources, interactive multimedia, and historical analysis. Your web site should be an accumulation of research and argument that incorporates textual and non-textual (photographs, maps, music, etc.) description, interpretation, and multimedia sources to engage and inform viewers about your chosen historical topic.

How is a Web Site Different from Other Categories?

Web sites can display materials online, your own historical analysis as well as primary and secondary sources. These can be photographs, maps, documents, or audio and video files. Web sites are interactive experiences where viewers can play music, solve a puzzle, or look at a video or click on different links. Viewers can move through the web site in various undirected ways. Web sites use color, images, fonts, documents, objects, graphics and design, as well as words, to tell your story.

Getting Started

• Decide whether you want to create your web site as part of a group or on your own.
• Research your topic first. Examine secondary and primary sources. From this research, create your thesis. This will be the point that you want to make with your historical web site.
• Narrow in on the content of your web site. Decide what information you want to incorporate in your web pages, including any photos, primary documents, or media clips you may have found. You should be sure to have plenty of supporting information for your thesis.
• Organize and Design
  -Keep It Simple: don't waste too much time on bells and whistles. Tell your story and tell it straight.
  -Borrow Ideas from Other Web Sites: find design elements that work and imitate them on your web site. Just remember to give credit where credit is due.
  -Make sure every element of your design points back to your topic, thesis, and/or time period. There should be a conscious reason for every choice you make about color, typeface, or graphics.