Good website: Collections at V&A: http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/index.html

In fact, this isn’t just a good website, it’s a great website.  I am reminded of what a former GMU literature professor, Dr. Colin Owens, used to say about poetry: either it’s good, bad, or transcendent, and very few items fall into the last category.  But at risk of hyperbole, I do think I might say that this website for a portion of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, is quite transcendent, due to its sleek design and impeccable function.

This Index to Collections of Consumer Goods at the Victoria and Albert is superb.  It appears likely that the V & A hired a graphic designer or two, as well as a web consulting firm.  This index is a clear and useful and easy-to-use interface which enables the user to access 30,000 works and over 50,000 images from the V&A’s collections, including ceramics, fashion, furniture, glass, metalwork, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture, and textiles.  The page has a Search function at upper right, with Sitemap and What’s On Display also up top.  The page then exhibits a bold header consisting of tasteful red and burgundy horizontal stripes, offering the navigational options which are offered on all the related sites, too: Home, Your Visit, Exhibitions, Collections, Research, Activities, Education, Support Us, and Shop Online.  The website gets major points for consistency, as the same controls are located on the same area on each page, and for ease of use, as the navigations are user-friendly and intuitive, as one would hope based on the recommendations we read from Petrik, Nielsen, Gales, and the professor.  This site appears to follow all of the functional and design rules suggested by the readings for this week—these functional and aesthetic guidelines are discussed in my previous blog.  The site offers most necessary information “above the fold,” and the information below the fold is formatted in the same manner, to provide a sense of continuity.  The major information on the page is divided into neat rows with 4 boxes each—the ideal number to give a sense of the items in each box, yet enable this virtual table of contents to be read in one glance, without having to pan over the page.  The site judiciously makes use of the technique called “Small Multiples” in the book Digital History by Cohen and Rosenzweig, and proves the point by those authors that this layout is familiar and user-friendly, as well as attractive and useful in the sense of focusing research.  As one would expect, each box on the homepage represents a Genre of Consumer Good, such as Furniture, Fashion, and Children’s Goods such as Dollhouses.  Simply clicking on the desired box leads the user to the set of pages on that theme, where one can do research, view objects and captions, plan a visit to the actual museum, watch videos about how the goods were made or preserved, or read articles about the scholarly significance of the artifacts, as well as other useful functions.

So while the functioning of the site is perfect, what about design?  It turns out that the aesthetics of the overall site are also superb—so this site for the V & A Museum gets 5 stars out of 5 from me.  All the pages are consistent in their understated cream-colored background, and their use of subtle red headers to delineate major topics, and burgundy sub-headers to mark off subtopics.  The photographs of objects are very high-quality and luminous, and the site allows users to adjust the zoom in order to give a better sense of scale and context of the objects.  The items chosen to represent their genre on the homepage are all beautiful when taken singly, and when considered all together, their colors do not clash.  Clearly, experts have put a great deal of thought into this simply stunning website!

Holly

P.S. This object doesn’t come from the time period I study, I just thought it was exquisite:

The Great Bed of Ware, made ca. 1590