How to Create a Website
The website category is the most interactive of all NHD categories. A website should reflect your ability to use website design software and computer technology to communicate your topic’s significance in history. Your historical website should be a collection of web pages, interconnected by hyperlinks, that presents both primary and secondary sources and your historical analysis. To engage and inform viewers, your website should incorporate interactive multimedia, text, non-textual descriptions (e.g., photographs, maps, music, etc.), and interpretations of sources. To construct a website, you must have access to the Internet and be able to operate appropriate software and equipment.
How is a Website Different from Other Categories?
Websites can display materials online, your own historical analysis as well as primary and secondary sources. Websites are interactive experiences where viewers can play music, look at a video or click on different links. Viewers can freely navigate and move through the website. Websites use color, images, fonts, documents, objects, graphics and design, as well as words, to tell your story.
Getting Started
• Research your topic first. Examine primary and secondary sources. From this research, create your thesis. This will be the point that you want to make
with your historical website.
• Narrow in on the content of your website. Decide what information you want to incorporate in your web pages, such as any photos, primary
documents, or media clips you may have found. You should be sure to have plenty of supporting information for your thesis.
• Create your website with the NHD Site Editor. Click here to begin the registration process.
• Consider organization and design.
o Keep it simple: don’t waste too much time on bells and whistles. Tell your story and tell it straight.
o Borrow ideas from other websites: find design elements that work and imitate them on your website. Just remember to give credit where credit is due.
o Make sure every element of your design points back to your topic, thesis, and/or time period. There should be a conscious reason for every
choice you make about color, typeface, or graphics.
PLEASE NOTE – If you converted your website to save from previous contest years, you will need to use a new email address to create an account for the 2015 contest. The email address is optional and only used to recover passwords in the event of forgotten or lost passwords.
With so many complaints in the past regarding the Scrib.d element on NHD Weebly, we have removed this element and recommend students post their bibliographies and process papers as PDF files on their websites, using the ‘File’ element under ‘Media’. Please visit the following website created by former NHD participant, Christopher Su, for helpful tips and guides: NHD Website Resources
If you have any further questions please email [email protected] with your current URL and login information. If you have lost your login information, cannot convert your standard Weebly to NHD Weebly, or need an account recovered please email [email protected].
CLICK HERE to go to the NHD "How to Create a Website" page.
with your historical website.
• Narrow in on the content of your website. Decide what information you want to incorporate in your web pages, such as any photos, primary
documents, or media clips you may have found. You should be sure to have plenty of supporting information for your thesis.
• Create your website with the NHD Site Editor. Click here to begin the registration process.
• Consider organization and design.
o Keep it simple: don’t waste too much time on bells and whistles. Tell your story and tell it straight.
o Borrow ideas from other websites: find design elements that work and imitate them on your website. Just remember to give credit where credit is due.
o Make sure every element of your design points back to your topic, thesis, and/or time period. There should be a conscious reason for every
choice you make about color, typeface, or graphics.
PLEASE NOTE – If you converted your website to save from previous contest years, you will need to use a new email address to create an account for the 2015 contest. The email address is optional and only used to recover passwords in the event of forgotten or lost passwords.
With so many complaints in the past regarding the Scrib.d element on NHD Weebly, we have removed this element and recommend students post their bibliographies and process papers as PDF files on their websites, using the ‘File’ element under ‘Media’. Please visit the following website created by former NHD participant, Christopher Su, for helpful tips and guides: NHD Website Resources
If you have any further questions please email [email protected] with your current URL and login information. If you have lost your login information, cannot convert your standard Weebly to NHD Weebly, or need an account recovered please email [email protected].
CLICK HERE to go to the NHD "How to Create a Website" page.