The Well Told Story: Noel Coward at the NYPL
The New York Public Library has several online exhibits that are easy to navigate, well organized, and full of great content! For me, an effective website is one that feels intuitive in navigating and consuming information.
I chose to spotlight the exhibit, “Noel Coward at the NYPL,” because I find the layout helpful for understanding how we can organize our digital exhibitions. This exhibit shares some of the archival material of renowned playwright, Noel Coward, with a narration of his life and works. The first landing page includes an introduction to the project, a link to additional and related sources, a link to the information of the curators, and finally a link to the exhibition page that showcases the archival material. I think the use of a preliminary introduction page would be helpful for our exhibit – I have seen some webpages where there is a video or image with text that invites you to proceed to the main website.
The main exhibition page is simple – explanatory text on the left, a great user-friendly widget (I’m not sure what the name of the device is) to scroll through photos on the right, and navigation buttons across the top. I like the look and feel of the device to navigate the photos – the photos are organized in a grid on the page, but when you click on an individual photo, the photo enlarges with more information.
Many of us will be sharing photos of items we share on the archives, therefore I think having some sort of platform to host our photos that is more than just floating in the middle of blogposts would be helpful!
**I tried to upload screenshots of the website onto this blogpost but an error keeps coming up. I will try again at a different time!**