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

Design Tip: Distribute Content Maintenance Tasks

At CANOE the content is maintained by a team of journalists, trained in HTML coding. Although a portion of their job is simple cutting and pasting stories downloaded from the newswire, their journalism training gives them a professional understanding of newsworthy timing and pithy headlines; they quickly adapted this expertise to the development of sophisticated, rapidly changing news articles tailored for the Web. “For two weeks Princess Diana was our top news story,” according to Dave Moore, on-line editor of CANOE CNews. “The story changed more than six times a day. What’s in a newspaper box is out of date before it’s even daylight. On CANOE we were able to coordinate and maintain more depth, more pictures, more information than anything CNN and Newsworld could do.”

Given the speed with which content can (and should) be updated, it is important to allow as many people as possible to participate in the content-development process. HTML editing tools can convert content into (basic) Web pages, while the site designer can provide content developers with predesigned HTML templates that simplify the authoring process. What actually goes on the site will be chosen and approved by the editorial staff, who can filter the stories and select those that are most appropriate.

Finally, be sure that hyperlink references to other Web sites are both accurate and active. Accuracy is always an issue—there is nothing more annoying to a reader than an erroneous or broken link. However, users are also deeply annoyed by inactive links—that is, URLs given as text references, but where this text is not an active link. While it is understandable that a company may not want visitors to leave their site and thus may wish to “leave out” such external links, this approach should be avoided: All implicit hypertext references should be made explicit via active links—even when the link is to a competitor’s site.

Design Tip: Build a Community

Through newsgroups or other discussion forums, a Web site can become a type of virtual community in which users can meet, shout, laugh, and talk. Such a sense of community helps to build loyalty amongst site visitors and to define the “sentiment” of the site.

Special-purpose forums can be established for discussions related to a special event, or to particularly moving news stories. As an example, the Princess Diana newsgroup on CANOE, created for writing condolences to the Princess’s family, quickly received over 1000 postings.

At the same time, it is important to take an active role in these discussion groups. Thus, the site should designate a newsgroup moderator, whose role includes maintaining civility in the forums, initiating discussion by posting questions to the group, and soliciting responses from visitors.

It is also important to establish an efficient process for handling e-mail queries. Users tend to mail in questions covering a wide range of topics, from requests for assistance in the use of a specific site application, to a request for help in locating content for a term paper. A content site is in the business of providing information and must be able to handle all such e-mail questions.

Design Tip: Advertising

The designers of an advertising-supported site must accommodate ad placement within the overall page layout. Although it is often difficult to integrate the desires of the design and marketing teams, it is important to do so early on in the design process. If this is not done, then the design team will later be forced to rework their design, as they will not have properly allowed for the placement of advertising content.

It is important that the page design be flexible enough to accommodate a range of possible advertising strategies, in order to ensure that advertising graphics can be successfully placed in the pages. While in print, radio, and television, there are standardized dimensions and position placements for advertising, on the Web such standards are still being established. While the Internet Advertising Bureau (www.iab.net) now advocates a set of standard banner sizes, these are not yet widely adopted.

Another advertising tactic involves creating sponsorship areas, whereby the advertising client buys the marketing rights to a complete section of the Web site. The section is then branded with the sponsor name, and the pages in that section are given graphics that advertise products from the site sponsor. Colgate-Palmolive recently made the largest Canadian on-line sponsorship buy in history when they purchased a $300,000 three-year agreement for exclusive Colgate-Palmolive branding of the CANOE Web site Hockey Pool section.

Competitive Analysis

Once the goal(s) of a Web site have been established, the next step is analyzing—on a continuous basis—the competition. The webmaster of the Federal Express Web site told author Evan Schwartz that she regularly “has to spend time looking at [UPS’s] site” because it is “an ultra-competitive industry.” Similarly, you should be constantly asking the following questions about each competitor’s Web site: How does their Web site look? What novel features are they employing, and are people using them? What kinds of technology features are employed and how useful are they? As Schwartz summarized, “the Web economy is a world in which a competitive advantage may only last a few months, if not weeks. Webmasters must act quickly and take a proactive stance toward employing new technologies before competitors do.”⁷

---

⁷WEBONOMICS, Evan Schwartz, Broadway Books, 1997, page 118.

---

Analyzing the Target Group

The next stage is to analyze the target group for the site and to determine how well this group is represented on the Internet. While the Internet is now breaking into mainstream usage, many groups are still under-represented. Recent Canadian demographic surveys reveal that Internet users are predominately college-educated males between the ages of 24 and 44, with household incomes exceeding $60,000 annually. Consequently, a site trying to appeal to women must recognize that 60 percent of today’s Internet users are male, and the number of sites focusing on female users is small. On the other hand, this might reveal the opportunity to fill an under-serviced niche.