History teaches BT nothing
Simon Willison asks us to blog about BT: connected earth, BT’s website devoted to the history of communication.
Without mentioning the non-flash site, Simon is totally correct about the non-intuitive interface. What was I supposed to do? Where am I clicking? Where is the information?
Once you are in the main part of the site, you are presented with a pretty looking screen, but with no where to go. The only thing that looks clickable is an graphic of an arrow which does nothing, and an image of some antique technology (today’s thing: Hughes telegraph printer). On the page this leads to the arrow is in fact clickable.)
You are actually supposed to click on some small white circles that surround another image to get to the other parts of the site (where they go; who knows, the titles don’t tell you, being “journeys, sort it, find it, visit it, etc etc).
Worse, iSilo just reported an error trying to convert the page, so the site cannot be looked at on my Palm Pilot.
From connected-earth: “As mobile devices such as PDAs and telephones start connecting, all predictions of the growth of the network have suddenly had to be revised upwards. For instance, Vint Cerf, who was estimating 900 million devices on the Internet by 2006, is now predicting three times as many.”
Shame quite a lot of these devices are never going to see this site.