This week we were instructed to evaluate websites of COPLAC’s past.

The first website I decided to visit was one from my own school, UMW, from last semester for the COPLAC course titled “Into the Woods: Experiments in Community, Sustainability, and the Examined Life.” The first thing I was impressed with was the photo gallery header on their home page. It was the perfect way for them to display what their website contained to help make their overall point. The photos with their captions acted like an overview in a way. We might implement something similar in our home page.

The one thing that I think their website is lacking is engaging content. As I clicked through each page (and there were a lot of pages) I noticed that the structure was mostly a quote followed by a small paragraph and that’s it. Only a few pages included a picture or two but those pictures were small and seemed tacked on at the end. I would have liked to see slideshows or other tools that we learned in our own class and larger pictures with more text. I just felt that most pages were bare and a few of them could have been combined into one page to better support their thesis.

The second website I decided to visit was the Montevallo website from spring of last year for COPLAC course titled “The Social Life of Books.” The theme the students chose for this website was extremely simple and didn’t make much use of the screen space, but their page layout was extremely appealing to the eye. They had a good balance between text and image so their wouldn’t be blocks of text and then several images. That is something I think we need to incorporate more of in our site. The balance is present on our home page and our national androgynous page, but we rely heavily on an embedded timeline or slideshow for the other pages which leaves blocks of text below the embedded feature. We might pull a few images out that help support our argument in the text to help break up the sea of words.

While I was really impressed and learned a lot about the history of Montevallo’s College Night (which is similar to UMW’s Devil Goat Day), I was confused by their pages under their production books tab. It seems the earlier years have a lot of content that the site’s authors were able to scan in and include, but there’s an information imbalance between that and the recent years. Perhaps this is because the tradition no longer needs such diligent record keeping because it digs into records of the past, but if that is so, I would have liked to see an explanation of that rather than only information on which team won: purple or gold?

Overall, I am impressed with both websites. They did quite a bit of research and I am glad to see that our website is coming up to the same level of academic scholarship as websites of the past. We obviously still have quite a bit of tweaking to make sure our thesis is fully and clearly supported, but with about two weeks before our final presentation I am confident we will get it to an equal level or better than the websites I reviewed today.