Why/How I Did This Project

By Scott Gordon

In the spring of 1997, I participated in the Washington Semester Program in Peace & Conflict Resolution at American University. Our planned Middle East trip fell through due to circumstances there, but we were still able to go to Northern Ireland. While there, we met many interesting academics, political figures, and ordinary people who talked to us extensively about the conflict. As luck would have it, the class was in Belfast for the signing of the Good Friday Peace Accord!!!

As part of a class project on article redesign, I chose an article dealing with Senator Mitchell and others who have received awards for excellence in Northern Ireland. In order to turn a half-page, straightforeward text article into a hypertext article, I wanted to link the article thematically to other sites or parts of sites dealing with peace in Northern Ireland. I decided to do a kind of newsletter format ('The Irish Olive Branch'), something easy on the eyes (the Irish flag) which would give the site a consistant and appropriate look. Putting all the main text within this middle band is also helpful to the reader, since it has been shown that the eye has a certain span across which it can read confortably. That is why newspapers are written in columns!!

Furthermore, all links are positioned within the text (biographies) or conveniantly located at the top of the page (the 'conflict' and 'peace' icons). Images (such as Bertie Ahern's picture and the Nobel Prize logo) are there simply for aesthetic purposes. You can always go back to the tope of the page or to the main article via the links at the bottom of the page. I did not use the principle of jumping around the text within the page, which would have been nice because people get tired of scrolling.

I pulled portions from several different sources in order to construct my webpage. The sources are as follows:

Mitchell Brokers Peace Deal & 'Irish Independent' logo

www.independent.ie/1998/313/d01K/shtml

Senator Mitchell Biography

http://www.megastories.com/ireland

N. Ireland Conflict Key Events

http://news.bbc.co.uk/ni/english/special_report/1998/

N. Ireland Peace Accord Key Points

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp~srv/inatl/longterm/nireland/keypoints.htm

Nobel Prizewinners '98 & "Nobel' logo

The peace icon (peace.gif) is from an internet-based 'peace poster' store. Look under 'peace images' or 'peace archetypes' on your browser to locate it.

http://www.nobel.se/announcement-98/peace98.html

Bertie Ahern Biography & Photograph

http://ww.irlgov.ie/taoiseach/default.htm

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