Below is a growing list of digital project criteria. If you have suggestions, please contact Melanie Hubbard.
Technical Basics
- All hyperlinks work and link to the appropriate place.
- All images appear.
- All URLs (web addresses) have been turned into hyperlinked text.
Example: If you are linking to Wikipedia’s article on the French Revolution don’t write http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution. Select appropriate text and turn it into a hyperlink like, French Revolution. If you can, put it into a preexisting written statement, i.e. “The French Revolution began in 1789…”
The specific words chosen to be hyperlinked should be logical, i.e. they lead to where users would expect.
Visuals
- All visuals, e.g. images and video, are relevant to the topic.
- All visuals are chosen based on the intellectual value or meaning they bring to the project.
- There are captions or text that explain the relevance of the image.
- All images are properly cited.
Written Content
- The written content is concise while being highly informative.
- The written content is a synthesis and analysis of authoritative information/data and your own thoughts. It is not cut and pasted (or paraphrased) information found on other websites.
Suggestion: Start by writing in a Word document. This will help you make sure you are generating enough of your own content and help you to avoid grammatical and spelling mistakes.
- Written content is logically organized and distributed throughout the site.
Explanation: Websites are usually broken up into a series of sub-pages. It is important to consider how the information you include is distributed throughout these pages. What information should go on page A and what information should go on page B depends on what you are trying to convey and how you want the site’s users to access the content.
Keep in mind, how you arrange your information has a substantial impact on the user’s ability to comprehend it as well as their desire to read it.
- Titles, headers, and captions are relevant, clear, descriptive and thoughtful.
- As with an essay or long paper, there is a clear flow of ideas.
- Quotes and paraphrased ideas are properly cited.
External Links
- External sites to which you link are selected based on how much they add to the content of the project. (What they link to adds or extends content. It is not, however, the actual content of your site.)
- The external sites are carefully selected based on the quality of information they provide.
Aesthetics
- There is an appropriate (aesthetically pleasing and intellectually stimulating) balance between text and images.
- Text and images complement each other.
- Images are tastefully formatted, i.e. they are an appropriate dimension, cropped so that rough edges are removed, they align well with the text and they are of an appropriate resolution so that they do not look pixelated (more info on image size).
- All text is easy to read, be it due to layout (e.g. spacing) or the choice of size, font, and color.
Remember: It may be better to have no image than a poor looking one.