When looking at how Omeka and Neatline were implemented, I explored both the History of the National Mall website as well as the article on the Great Molasses Flood.
For the national mall site, I liked the simplicity of their URL. I feel like it is definitely easy to share via the internet as well as verbally due to its simplicity. Additionally, it was extremely easy to navigate especially since the creators even included a section devoted to walking the audience through how to properly use the site to get the most out of it. There was a good picture to text ratio making it interesting to read along. One really cool feature was that it was compatible with most, if not all, mobile devices and tables so that users could utilize this site while physically at the national mall. I love that the home button and search bar were so easy to find, making it even more accessible to go and explore more parts of the website. These were definitely qualities that I wish to incorporate into our own site as we begin mapping out the cemetery.

I was far less impressed with the molasses flood article. The zooming in and out was frustrating and sometimes when you went to scroll up and down the page it would instead zoom in and out on the article. Each time a text box was clicked on to give more information, it covered up the article which made the page look cluttered and unappealing.

Of the Rozenzweig participants, I focused on the Wilson Center’s digital archive. This site also had a good, clear and concise url that is easy to share. The color scheme was nice and simple however the text was smaller than preferred and there was so much information there it was hard to know what the best place to start was. There was no header that chunked the themes into different categories, so it was a lot of clicking around to see what was available making it difficult to know which page you had come from previously.

I looked at both the Valley of the Shadow and  Gilded Age Plains City sites .
The Valley of the Shadow website was easy to navigate and I liked how the maps were used as jumping off points for more information and were categorized by time period. The information was fantastic, I only wish that more pictures could have been  utilized throughout the website.
As far as the Gilded Age Plains City page, I thoroughly enjoyed the layout and the homepage was intriguing and made me want to explore more of the site. It was simple, yet still managed to grab my attention. The dropdown menu on the spatial narratives page was a nice touch, however I was unable to find the interactive map that was linked within the ‘Exploring the City’ page. The information was definitely all there but was written in a way that was exciting to read and captivated my attention. The catchy home page, captivating writing and smart use of pictures are things that would be ideal to keep in mind as we begin building our website.

Lastly, of the Journal of American History projects, I looked at the article on WWI America. Honestly, the site did not grab my attention at all. The website had so much information and was structured very similarly to a scholarly database which is fine but wasn’t as interesting to browse through as some of the previous sites listed above. There was so much information that it was hard to determine what was information about Minnesota and their research process or what WWI in America was really like.