Dmitriy Sintsov wrote:
When one looks for educational / academic content, rich and colorful interface only distracts the reader. The following site is not mediawiki / monobook based, yet the visual design is simple: http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html There is nothing wrong with it. Actually, there is real beauty in simpicity. Dmitriy
The visual design is fine here, but information architecture is seriously lacking here.
Of course, it's hard to design a navigation interface for a heterogeneous collection of concepts as you see here, but the alphabetical index doesn't play as well online as it does in print. The eye and hand can scan alphabetically much faster in a book than you can do online.
There are the really obvious problems that show up in alphabetical listings: for instance, many people forget to fold "The" when they do queries against online library catalog systems; more modern systems ought to do the folding for you automatically, but there's really no incentive for libraries to improve the services they offer their patrons. Similarly, today it's pretty reasonable for a system to accomodate people who are looking for "Adorno, Theodore" or "Theodore Adorno".