Throughout my time working with The Norman Sicily Project, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about so many different areas of study that I never would have experienced otherwise. Recently, I’ve been working on confirming the existence of the churches during the Norman period. In these past few weeks, I’ve gotten a glimpse at how historians use sources for their research. I had no idea how hard this was until I had to do it myself. It is extremely difficult to find the information that this site contains, since it all comes from different sources, which are often hard to track down or in another language.

You might have noticed that The Norman Sicily Project’s website has recently undergone a lot of changes. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on creating a new interface for the site. Here’s a little behind the scenes of how we did everything.

First Things First

The first thing you should have when redesigning a website is a goal. What do you want from the new site? What can be improved upon from the current site? With The Norman Sicily Project, we wanted better accessibility and a better interface. These improvements would bring activity to the site and educate people about Sicily’s Norman past, which is the main goal of the project. Here’s some of the feedback we used to make changes to the site: