Post 2: Jason Aglietti's experiences as an intern at the Maryland State Archives

Previously, I spoke about my internship with the Maryland State Archives and my project of redesigning their website for their research project called Finding the Maryland 400.  I knew it would be a large undertaking and it would require thinking about the website in a radically different way. 

Tim Grove’s article “History Bytes: Website Redesign” talks a bit about the importance of website redesign that was particularly helpful.  “An organization should be conducting ongoing usability testing to remain aware of challenges its users experience on its website.”[1]  Making the “user experience” more intuitive became the focal point of my project. I did this in a few ways. 

First we tackled aesthetics.  The old website was boring and looked dated. I also wanted to address issues like the cover image for the website and by creating a new theme.  The image that was on there (see screen shot below) was a low-quality photograph of the memorial at the battleground of the Battle of Brooklyn.  While this might be a touching tribute, the image did not look great nor did it depict what actually happened. The image I wanted was a painting by Alonzo Chappel, The Battle of Long Island (1858) whose rights were owned by the Brooklyn Historical Society.  This is the only color rendition of the battle itself, and it looks much more pleasing than the previous photo. My supervisor, Owen got in contact with them and they granted us permission to use it for free. Next, we launched a new and inviting theme.  

Screen shot of previous website design.

Another problem was that the blog page was overrun with clutter from previous employees that we agreed looked overwhelming. We knew we needed to make it much easier for visitors to find the best and most relevant information quickly. So we removed clutter, switched around some of the menus (including deleting pages that people no longer were clicking on), and designed an intuitive experience that people would not get lost exploring.   (See photo of the new design below).

Screen shot of new theme, cover photo, and design.

I then started cleaning up the blog, which is most visited part of the website, with over 7,000 unique visitors last year.  Over the next couple of weeks, we transformed it from being a non-searchable endless sea of posts, to a much more engaging experience.  We changed the way the blog page looked in the new theme. We also wanted to figure out a way to highlight the best and most informative blog posts from the previous three (almost four) years. I did this by creating a “featured entries” page. I designed the page so that it would have a "post of the month" to highlight random posts throughout the year.  The intent is to try and make them thematically relevant (like highlighting a post featuring women's role in the Continental Army during Women's History Month).  We also created sub topics, each with three attached posts that tend to be more popular with users.  At the bottom, we created 10 genre categories and tagged every single post (of well over 100) with different labels to so that they coincided with these genre labels.  Within two weeks, we saw an immediate response from the public, with many older posts -- most of which have not had any clicks in years -- receiving attention.  The featured page also quickly became one of the top three pages clicked on since it launched. 

In my next post, I will focus on the biography and education pages that we created, and how the rest of the project wrapped up. 

[1] Tim Grove, “History Bytes: Website Redesign” History News, Vol. 66, No. 2 (SPRING 2011), pp. 6.