4/22

Hypertext Gardens was a really affective site because, as has been the case with some of the other Mark Bernstein articles we have looked at, he demonstrates his idea as he is writing about it. He does this particularly well in this website. The main idea seemed to be that having a design that is both brief and visually appealing is the preferred method of web design. He also writes about the idea of not necessarily having a home page that all individual pages eventually link back to. Overall, Bernstein’s website demonstrates this and his other ideas really well.

'In the Changing Room' was a pretty interesting site to read through. I think the fact that there were eight narrators made it a little overwhelming, but as a whole the site was pretty fun to navigate through. The site’s best feature was its ability to allow the reader to stay along one story line or switch to another by clicking a highlighted word. The design was very simple and there weren’t really any pictures, but I didn’t notice this at first since the reader is only on one page for a few seconds, the focus is on the navigation and the text instead of the actual design of the page. Because of this, I thought this site was very good and demonstrated some navigational techniques that might be useful for the third project.

I thought 'Random Paths' was alright, but not as good as the first two. It had a really simple navigational structure, only letting you choose between two different options at a time. The pictures were the most interesting aspect of the piece and there was a pretty cool relationship between the hypertext and the pictures that accompanied it. Other than that, I found the piece to be a little more one-dimensional than some of the other hypertext pieces we have looked at recently, although it was still very interesting to look at from a visual standpoint