HTML 4.0 Sourcebook
(Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Author(s): Ian S. Graham
ISBN: 0471257249
Publication Date: 04/01/98

Make Resources Easy to Find

Your collection is there to be read, so make it easy for users to find what they are looking for. A visitor should be able to get to the primary content after only a couple of clicks—most visitors will give up if the resources they are searching for are too deeply embedded. Ensuring easy accessibility of pages requires a careful analysis of the intent of the site, the available content, and content usage. You can monitor how your documents are being used by analyzing the Web server log files. If you find that a particular resource is very popular, you can then add direct links from your home (or other) page to this resource to make it more easily accessible. Many commercial servers come with simple analysis tools, while a number of commercial, shareware, and freeware analysis packages are also available. Go to “Web Management and Maintenance Tools” on the companion Web site for a list of some of the more popular utilities.

Making information easy to find also means letting people know when resources are not available. For example, a visitor to an airline Web site will probably be looking for airline flight information and ticket prices. However, since ticket prices are notoriously variable, it is hard to keep Web-based data up-to-date. If this is the case, the site should have a page that says exactly this, and that provides an alternative (yes, even a 1-800 number) for further inquiries regarding fares.

Note Changes and Updates

Indicate on your Web pages when you make changes or additions. It is then easy for frequent visitors to know when content has been added and furthermore lets new visitors know that the collection is being continuously improved—visitors will keep coming back if they know you are keeping the site up-to-date.

Retain Site Visitors

No doubt you want people to stick around at your site once they arrive and, of course, if you have followed all my design pointers, they are bound to do so! However, one easy way to unwittingly send visitors away is to explicitly give them, just after they have arrived, links to locations outside your local web. It is generally a bad idea to include, on your home (or other high-level) pages, links to “KooL SiTEs” or “Important Resources” elsewhere on the Web, as your visitors will be tempted to head right there—and never come back. Instead, put this information further down in your collection, thereby forcing users to step through and see some of your own work before arriving at these external references.

Solicit User Feedback

Your pages should allow for user feedback—so that users can make inquiries, point out problems (broken links, non-functional search tools, etc.), or provide commentary. This can be done by using mailto URLs or fill-in feedback forms. Of course, if you use such a tool, you must also be ready to deal with the mail. You must make sure to respond to the mail you receive—after all, if a visitor goes to the trouble of sending you commentary, it would be very impolite not to respond!

Preserve Individual Privacy

You must guard your visitor’s privacy. No user would be happy knowing that you were directly monitoring his or her access to information, just as you would be unhappy to find that someone was monitoring the books or magazines you were reading. If you analyze the log files, you should do so in a way that preserves user anonymity; for example, by hiding the domain names of the clients or by looking at aggregate information averaged over many users.

Creating an Attractive Web Site

This is clearly an open-ended section, as the design of a popular and attractive Web site depends enormously on both the material being presented and the intended audience. This section summarizes those features that, in the author’s opinion, apply in most cases.

Useful, Timely, and Interesting Information

If your site does not provide something newer, better than, value-added, or different from other Web sites, no visitor will bother coming back. Before you design a site, think about how your material will be novel, different, or better than already existing resources. If you can’t, then you should try thinking of something else to do. And, if you are presenting something new and different, be sure to explain why it is better or different.

Make the Site Dynamic

The Web is dynamic and encourages communication. Your site should recognize and embrace these facts by encouraging user feedback and user interaction and by providing information that is updated on a regular (that is, daily or weekly) basis. Some of the more attractive Web resources, such as daily cartoons (Dilbert), Web contests, newspapers, the amazing Fishcam (try searching for Fishcam at your favorite Web search engine!), browsable archives of mailing lists, and so on, do exactly this (you can find these examples by searching the Yahoo index). You should strive to implement similar dynamic and interactive features at your site.

Make the Site Fast

You must make sure that your visitors can quickly access your information. As a first test, you should access your content using a 14.4 or 28.8 Kbaud modem—after all, this is what most of your visitors will be doing. If the pages seem slow and irritating to you under these conditions, imagine how irritating they will be to real visitors!

Your Web server should have a high-speed connection to the Internet, so that any delays in delivering content are not due to your own low-speed link. This is particularly important if your site contains a lot of images, which are notoriously big files and correspondingly slow to download. At a minimum, you should have an ISDN-speed connection (128 Kbps), and really you should have something much faster, such as a T1 (1.44 Mbps) line.

You don’t necessarily need to lease high-speed bandwidth all for yourself—instead, you can choose to lease space on a commercial Web server (usually through an Internet Service Provider, or ISP), which in turn has a fast network connection. However, you should make sure that the ISP has a fast Internet connection that is not saturated by heavy use—just like a superhighway, even the fastest network connection slows dramatically when heavily used. You can check the “effective” speed of the connection by accessing a server from networks serviced by other Internet Service Providers—this will tell you if there are significant network bottlenecks between the server and your prospective visitors.