writer's memo: hypertext

HISTORICAL CAPITAL CITIES OF ETHIOPIA

Axum

Lalibela

Addis Ababa

Writer's Memo

Purpose:

The purpose of this essay is to give a brief introduction to Ethiopia's historical capital cities. It is educational and can be helpful to almost anyone interested in this topic. However, it is mainly written to those who do not have much knowledge of Ethiopia's History with the aim of giving a glimpse of the country's history and hopefully arouse interest.

Design and writing decisions:

Different ways can be used to go from one page to another. This site is intended to give information therefore, I do not want people to get lost when they go into deeper pages. Consequently, different links are added to aid visitors in getting where they want to go and be able to trace back their paths.

The text is written in a way that a page is comprehensive on its own but, additionally, the hypertext allows the users to directly access links that will give them more historical aspects of the country or give further explanation of a place or person. Unlike traditional text, there are more paths the users can follow.

How the essay should/could be read:

The essay can be read in different ways depending on who is using it. Since, it is basically written for those with limited knowledge of the topic an easy path is designed. The menu on the home page and those on top of all the other pages are listed chronologically and can be accessed from anywhere within the site. The back buttons in deeper pages take the users to the previous page they were at. However, they cannot access the main menu from these pages because they are left gray to help the user know where exactly they are.

On the other side, someone who is familiar with the cities on this site does not have to follow any path but can directly click on the link to the desired city.

Difficulties in writing/design decision:

It is hard to take part of history and try to write about it since many things are intertwined. Therefore, it was hard to decide what to write and what to leave out in this web site. I tried to stay as close to the topic as possible and give links to things I believe to be really important or are closely related to this part of the country's history.

Design difficulties were faced while deciding the navigation tools. Even though I was tempted to let the reader get a bit lost in deeper pages, I finally decided it would be against the main purpose of the site, which is education and information, and added links that could help users trace their path.

BSU|ENGL 5170 | Arsi's Page