When looking at these sites, I had a problem with just about everyone of them. Devices of Wonder has never really caught my interest, while at the same time, it gives me the feeling that if a person were to stumble upon it by accident, they might be amused for about 2 minutes before giving up on the site and moving on.
History Wired seems like a great site in concept, except I appear to be having problems with it. Every time I go to click on something for more details, it just shows the general information that was in the tag about the item. Also, zooming in on the item doesn’t seem to illuminate the object. Instead it just seems to zoom in on an empty space. I don’t know if that is just a problem with my browser, or if the site is temporarily disabled, but as it stands, it seems conceptually cool…But it has an outdated look and it appears to not work.
The History Channel has a very clean and well organized site, but unfortunately like the instructions say under the tag for it, it is very large in scope, and unless a user is going there for a very specific item or task, I can see them getting lost and navigating away from it quickly so that they could quickly check wikipedia or google.com instead.
While I absolutely love the way in which the Julia Child’s website grabs the user right away by having her speak to you directly during your somewhat self guided tour, for some reason I just didn’t find it as appealing as the Raid on Deerfield website.
The Raid on Deerfield site that we have all examined several times seems to really get what a digital historian should be trying to convey to a large audience. It is engaging and colorful, while at the same time not being overbearing to look at. The ability to navigate the page through different points on view (while I might be slightly biased based on my own project) really captures the moment in history, while allowing the user to pick their own route in learning the information.
Though just about all of these sites have a chance to capture a large audience, I can’t think of a site with a more interesting topic, or way of presenting said topic, then the Raid on Deerfield site.