Shadowed Realm - Your Guide to Medieval History

If anyone has any ideas for ways in which to improve the site and make it a better resource, I'd appreciate any suggestions or comments.

--------------------

You can access the search function directly at: http://www.shadowedrealm.com/search/

Here is a direct URL to the new maps area: http://medieval.shadowedrealm.com/maps/

As always, I have new features and more additions to the site in the works, so be sure to keep checking back to see what's new and improved in the near future.

--------------------

First off in my opinion your site is poorly named. Why would anyone with a serious or passing in the Middle Ages frequent a site whose name has no real connection to the period. A name means alot it can be serious like Internet Medieval Sourcebook or it can be clever like NetSerf but it should atleast seem relavant to your audience.

Secondly your site fills no nitch. There are several general medieval sites which have been around far longer and a far more content heavy than yours. Most successfull new sites are limited in scope and are aimed at building either content or a community around a small area.

To respond to the first part of your post, the reason that I named the site Shadowed Realm is that I originally didn't know exactly what direction I would go with the site when I first purchased the domain name. I've also built up the name of the site, so if I were to change it now I might have to basically start over. To see what I mean, you can perform a search of 'medieval history' on MSN, where my site is ranked second. Plus, since I always tie the title to medieval history (i.e. Shadowed Realm - Your Guide to Medieval History), I think that Shadowed Realm might actually be easier for some people to remember than a URL with 'medieval' in it. For example, let's say my domain was medievalhistory.com. How well with that do with people who spell 'medieval' like 'midevil', which I've definitely seen before. Medieval history is probably also a shadowed realm for a lot of people, so the title is not wholly unconnected. I'm not saying that you don't have a point (and one I'm definitely going to consider), but I'm just saying there are a lot of things involved. As you said in your post, the choice of a name is really important.

I do disagree, however, that my site fills no niche. There are several general medieval sites, as you said, that have been around far longer than mine. Yet in less than a year's time, let's compare my site to a popular one like NetSERF. NetSERF has three major areas: a glossary, links, and news items. The glossary has 1,499 terms. At this point, I have 694, almost half, and I'm still in the process of adding more. Not only that, but my glossary is more conveniently organized into categories and is also searchable. NetSERF does have many more links than I do at this point, but I can definitely add more in the future. Shadowed Realm does not have any news items, but those found on NetSERF are all old - there haven't been any new items in years.

There are several things that make my site stand out from a general site like NetSERF. My site has articles, a timeline, maps that to my knowledge are not to be found anyplace else on the net, quotations, and more. My site definitely needs more content, but I think that I'm already doing better than if I had heavily focused exclusively on one particular aspect of medieval history. In the future, I may end up having one or more focus areas in the future, but I think it's important to have some relatively general information first.

--------------------

As to the name, I agree with Brent completely. I've never visited your site because when I saw the name I assumed it was some fantasy role playing site. I like your maps and have therefore bookmarked your site, but I would have passed you by (and probably have) if I hadn't seen your post here.

I can tell you from personal experience that names can be changed successfully, especially when you're growing your market. Like most SCA costume makers, I started out with a cutesy name for my business (Gwen's Garb). When I decided to make reproduction clothing my business instead of my hobby I switched to Black Swan Designs and it's one of the best business decisions I've ever made. A good name says something about your business/website/whatever before anyone ever sees what you have to offer. I'm absolutely positive places like the Tower of London and the Frazier would not have considered using my services twice if I had kept using "Gwen's Garb" because it reeks of a small time garage hobbyist making poly T-tunics in her spare time-- which is exactly what I was then! "Black Swan Designs" sounds polished and professional, which reflects what the business has become. Ah, the power of marketing.....

Just my opinion of course!

What do you think?

--------------------

Originally I went fell into the trap of stooping to your level of negative criticism (I took a look at your own site- www.mediumaevum.com), but I'm just going to say that I'm not going to listen to someone who has published a site like yours lecture me about how to run my site, so I'm glad you didn't end up posting whatever you had written.

[ 05-22-2005: Message edited by: ShadowedRealm ]

--------------------

I still like the maps, and I'm glad you listed where you got them. My first thought when I saw them was "I wonder where these came from and if the site owner is violating copyright law", but I think having been published in 1913 puts them in the public domain now, doesn't it?

Don't you find it a little odd that no one posted about your site the first time you asked and then even after the second time I was the one who posted. I actually looked at your website the first time you posted because I remember thinking it odd that Robert L. Coleman, Jr. was posting in your forum and did not think it fit him real well from what I know about him. Your site is pretty although the ads are an instant turnoff, you lack an audience because there is not a general medieval audience out there. There are academics, students, re-enactors, recreationalists, fantasy people, military history buffs, and wargamers. Your articles are unsigned and some of the "Submitted Articles" are little more than summaries from books. While the quotations are kinda neat the timeline is seriously lacking. From someone who has a foot in several of the above mentioned group the information you do have is either slim or I don't really trust it alot, there are already dozens of specific medieval boards and lists so why should one choose your forum over any other one.

You can do whatever you want with your webspace and will but unless you have content that people want the best you can hope to build is web traffic based off websearches. If you want to look at a successful site with content and a busy board go and look at www.armourarchive.org .

I didn't ask your opinion of my website nor do I really care. Most of the stuff up there I've done for me and to be able to send people to in specific situations, even the new pages I'm working on are thing I would like to see more people in the 15th century England re-enactment community read. I'm not trying to build a site to get hits from random people.

Thanks for wishing me luck and for your comments - I have really appreciated both. Yes, all of the maps are in the public domain.

Brent -

I didn't find it odd that no one posted about my site the first time around here at FireStryker because the whole point in my posting my link in a variety of medieval forums is to get the word out, as well as to hear what people like and don't like about my site. How else am I to improve it so that more people can find what they want at the site?

I do realize that there are many different people interested in medieval history (usually in specific aspects of it), and I also realize that my site is not for everyone. I also understand that my site does not (nor will it ever) contain an exhaustive amount of content on the medieval period. The exclusive articles were all written by me - most are essays that I wrote as an undergrad history major. I will add my name as author to these because I had previously incorrectly assumed that people who visited my site would realize that my exclusive articles were written by me.

As for the submitted articles, I realize that many do not answer any earth-shattering questions, but I accept submissions in all areas of my site so that people can share their knowledge. I think that this is an important aspect of the site.

I'm sorry that you do not trust the information you find on my site, although I'm not sure why you'd trust it any less than information that you'd find on similar Web sites. I try to avoid any errors as much as possible, and I welcome anyone to try and find what errors there are so that they can be corrected.

I'm curious what you'd specifically want to see at my site to prove credibility (other than the many citations) and so that you would want to visit there.

--------------------

This is just a nit of mine, but "exclusive" does not imply that you are the author of the content, but rather you hold the rights to articles that may have been written by you or another party and can only be posted on your site.

There's a lot of stuff out there on the net that is far from reliable, so an article with no name may make folks question its validity. I've gone on MANY archaeological digs at web site after web site looking for the mythical citation or author and have only found regurgitated information and no means of verifying it for myself. Yeah...I'm one of those who will go find the actual source to see for myself. Mistakes happen especially in translations and interpretations.

Is it MY guide to Medieval History? No, but that's okay. My area of interest is more focused, 1467 to 1477. I have other things that I am researching, but it is still focused on the 15th c. and usually cannot be addressed by general history sites.

Gwen and Brent are right about "what's in a name". You want to be less prosey and more literal about who you are and what your site does. So you're working in the right direction.

Shadow Realm makes me think of the movie Dragon Heart. "This is the Shadow Realm of the Round Table". I too thought it was a RPG site.

While you may compare Brent's site "stylistically", his site appeals more to me because it has the more specific data that I am seeking. Not articles he's written, but nuggets of info that he's found in Primary sources/Secondary sources. He has links to databases both art and information, historical letters and papers and the items are grouped into categories for quick find.

I think you have to ask:

"Who is my target audience?"

Does your information appeal to the RenFaire Crowd, the LH crowd, or the average medievalist? You can try to please everyone.

A focused web site that has nice, well researched content is what I personally look for.

Is there a niche you can fill?

If so, maybe structure your site around that. Become the source for that niche instead of another "all you can eat" buffet style site.

Good Luck,

J

[ 05-23-2005: Message edited by: Fire Stryker ]

--------------------

quote:

---

Originally posted by ShadowedRealm:

I'm sorry that you do not trust the information you find on my site, although I'm not sure why you'd trust it any less than information that you'd find on similar Web sites. I try to avoid any errors as much as possible, and I welcome anyone to try and find what errors there are so that they can be corrected.

I'm curious what you'd specifically want to see at my site to prove credibility (other than the many citations) and so that you would want to visit there.

---

You would have to give me a specific site to compare to to say why I trust a certain site and there are parts of other sites that I don't. But I will say this, one of the first things I did was litmus tests on parts of the site like for example the Glossary. I chose a term that is difficult to deal with in this case 'Bastard Feudalism' and then decided whether I would ever send someone to that definition or explination to help them understand the subject and the answer was no. Thats not to say that some other online glossary has a better explination, just that I wouldn't use your glossary.

In general for articles there are two things which atleast one of which you learned in school. Things must be thoroughly noted. The other that is not always taught is that the author must show that they used or looked at all pertinent sources and works on a subject.

The "Exclusive Articles" are fine although lightly sourced but they deal mostly with issues that have been written about quite a bit so for me it becomes why I should read your essay on the topic instead of some other work.

Thanks for your insights. I'm glad both you and Brent brought up the unsigned exclusive articles. This is now corrected.

Brent,

I'm not sure what you're expecting of my site exactly, but from the sounds of things you want me to be a complete expert in the field of medieval history and to only write articles about topics in which I have specialized knowledge.

Were any of my exclusive articles meant to be published when I wrote them? No. Were any of them meant to further scholarly knowledge in the field? No. Each (other than the "The Medieval Period: Some Important Points", which I'll admit is general to the extreme) were written for courses that I took at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and they each received high marks. They present a synthesis of not only what I learned during lectures but also what I discovered through analysis of primary sources and some secondary sources.

The idea that "the author must show that they used or looked at all pertinent sources and works on a subject", especially in this situation, is ludicrous. For one thing, do you have any idea of how much information and how many pertinent sources there are in any given subject? I would think that you do considering some of the sources that you've collected on your site. Even if you spent years trying to find them all, you would miss some, and I'm sure there are others (primary sources) that are as of yet unresearched and/or undiscovered. If every author of every article did this (even purely scholarly articles), how would it even be possible to write a manageable-length article?

There are scholars that do this sort of work, and even then much of what they publish is not as meticulous as you might think. I index journal articles for the UIUC library, the largest public university library in the world. Based on my experience, I can tell you that many (if not most) articles are not as well-referenced as you seem to want my articles to be. After submission, articles submitted to academic journals undergo peer review, and they are often criticized for ommissions and weaknesses in their arguments. Even recognized scholars are imperfect.

I have a feeling that if I were a grad student in history the articles I would write would be more to your liking. Instead, I'm a grad student in another field, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to write journal articles like that. Honestly, if I did, I would have gone to school to become a professor of medieval history, but I have chosen to go a different route.

As for the glossary, I think that the glossary provides a good very general overview of the terms it contains. A glossary is not an encyclopedia, nor is a glossary supposed to contain in-depth knowledge. According to Dictionary.com, a glossary is "A list of often difficult or specialized words with their definitions, often placed at the back of a book." You seem knowledgable enough about medieval history so that such a glossary might not serve much of a purpose for you. So when you look at a term that you already know the definition of, of course a glossary will not provide you with any further information.

--------------------

I go to medieval websites for mainly two reasons. 1) They have links to information I will probably find usefull 2) They have information that I will find usefull. Outside of sources and artwork, I expect information to be to a high standard. Does that mean that the person has to be an expert in the field. No. Does it mean that they have to show to me in a short period of time that they know what they are talking about. Yes. There is to much else to read to spend time reading that which you are not reasonable sure is good. On alot of topics there is enough written by academics out there that unless someone is extremely knowledgeable in the field your better off reading elsewhere. Some topics unfortunately are less well developed and you read what is avalible and cope.

--------------------

--------------------

It's a rather pretty flowering tree. But, I think you're right, I haven't found anything out there that indicates a medieval connection. The tree seems to be indigenous to North America spanning from the Carolinas North to the NY/PA/CT area.

Did I mention it was pretty?

I prefer Gardinias and Lilacs.

[ 05-25-2005: Message edited by: Fire Stryker ]

--------------------

--------------------

Thanks for the positive feedback,and yes, I will continue to add lots more content in the future. Sorry you weren't able to access the site at first - do you remember what the error was that you encountered?

Gwen,

I'm from Illinois, and there are some lilacs about. Are there a lot more on the East Coast?

[ 05-25-2005: Message edited by: ShadowedRealm ]

--------------------

--------------------

Man I miss that smell. *sigh*

Oh, sorry. What were we talking about?

(sorry for leading everyone down the garden path ).

--------------------

- I ended up keeping the name, mostly because most of my current visitors were against the idea of my changing it.

- There is now a contest going on, called the Grand Medieval Historian Competition, which has cash prizes. For full details, visit the link.

- I added more maps to the maps area (there are now almost 60, divided into three categories), along with some other content in various sections of the site.

- I added a new Medieval Wiki section to the site yesterday.

Thanks.

[ 07-24-2005: Message edited by: ShadowedRealm ]

--------------------