Defining the site
Identifying the audience
Assessing
effectiveness
Getting seen
Structure of the website
Navigation
Browser
capacity
Page design to increase your presence
Speed, size and complexity of
pages
Creating content
Keeping the audience
External
resources
Links
Copyright
Relations with others (internal and external)
Commissioning pages
Maintenance schedule
Continuity
Good housekeeping
Quality and
authority
Measuring site popularity and gathering statistics
Questions: What's your name?
Where do you work?
What are your web and other relevant responsibilities?
What do you most
want to get out of today?
This starts with defining who you are. What do you and your organisation do? Do you have a mission statement, for example? Who are your key clients? What do they come to you for? Do you sell a product, or a service? So, the first question you need to answer is 'Should the image of our site be representative of who we are now?' Alternatively, if you're forward thinking, it might be more appropriate to ask 'Will the site be representative of who we are going to be?' When you are starting out on the Internet you are starting with something close to a clean sheet. With a few international exceptions, the majority of Internet users probably won't actually know who you are. You can project any kind of image that you wish to - its entirely up to you. Moreover, you can emphasis any particular aspect of your organisation that you wish to.
Sit down with some colleagues and some paper and brainstorm until you come up with a series of points that match your organisation and what you do, or wish to do. Next, you need to match that to the kind of image you want to portray on your site. If for example, you are a library, you will want to ensure that the image you portray will be that of an organisation which knows the value of information and how to access it quickly and easily. Consequently, when it comes time to actually put the site together you can ignore the flashy graphics and animation's and concentrate on guiding the user quickly and effectively to the information that they need. On the other hand, if you are a high tech computer company, you'll want to demonstrate this to your potential users and the use of Java applets and so on may be rather more important. Use your site to display your particular abilities to their best advantage; in other words, play to your strengths.
Corporate image comes into play here as well. You will probably want to make sure that the image on the web pages matches that of the image displayed in other formats and media. However, don't forget you are starting from scratch here, so you have a free hand. It might actually make sense to have some subtle changes on the web site; if your corporate colour is blue, think about changing to another shade, or be radical and go for red! Decide on a theme and stick to it. Use the same logo on your pages, in the same position, in the same size. Alternatively, make use of different background colours to alert the viewer that they are leaving one part of your site and going to another part. When I worked for SilverPlatter Information, the background for the majority of the site was a cream type marble background, to match a series of marble columns we were using for our logo. However, when users came to those pages which dealt with downloading software, I returned to the normal grey background instead. A subtle difference, but I think an important one.
Questions: What is the 'voice' of your organisation?
How is this reflected in your web site?
Are you going to choose
different voices for different communities?
Are you there to promote your
organisation?
Are you there to provide information about your organisation?
Are you there to make money?
Are you there for all those reasons?
The size of audience on the web.
The inherent problem of
obtaining information of this nature is that you are only obtaining information
on a self selecting group, and consequently this has to be taken into account.
A random sample of Internet users will probably be male, 20's, computer
literate, reasonably well off and living in Europe or the United States.
Consequently, it is useful to have some information about the demography of
Internet users, and this can be obtained by visiting sites such as Bluesky at
http://www.blueskyinc.com/ This site
contains some very interesting data indeed: they suggest that the total number
of worldwide online households will grow to almost 67 million from just 23.4
million today. About 29 million, or 43%, of those households will be located
outside of North America compared to roughly 32%, or 7.5 million, today. (http://www.blueskyinc.com/statgraf.htm)
GVU run a series of reports on Internet growth and demographics and their executive survey of April/May 1999 at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-1998-04/#exec concludes that "the general demographics of the user population moved closer to the characteristics of the general population with a continued increase in the proportion of female users (38.7%), a decrease in the average income ($52,000 in the US), slightly lower level of educational attainment (50.1% college or more), and a diversification of occupations away from the domination of computer and education-related fields. This new diversity among WWW users is brought about by a group of new users (less than a year on the Net) that is mostly female (51.7%) and more likely to be under 20 or over 50 years old than in their middle years. This process is not yet as noticeable in Europe where the shape of the age profile curve for this year is almost identical to the general profile in 1994."
Jupiter Communications are also predicting that online shopping in France, Germany and the UK will increase 35 - 40 percent over the next five years (http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?service=view_survey&survey_number=1038&rel=no) Finally, if you want to know how many people are currently using the Internet Jupiter Communications estimate that the figure for September of this year is 148 million world-wide. (http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html) with 7.2 million of those based in Great Britain (though that figure is only accurate to December last year).
Quality of the audience
Gauging your audience is one of the
most important elements of good web page design, and little can even be started
without that.
The desired audience will have a great impact on how the page
is created and what you place on it. What machines will they be using? What
will appeal to them? What won't appeal to them?
Authority of your page How
will you make it clear that your page is authoritative? How often will you
update it? Will you take a particular bias? Will you put links into other
(possibly competing) organisations?
People come to you, because they've seen an advert with your URL, a link
from another web page, or perhaps via a search engine. It is possible to exert
a certain amount of control over this;
· Make sure that your URL is
listed on all of your hard copy material
· Include electronic
contact details on your business cards
· Write your web pages
carefully to ensure that key terms are mentioned appropriately and in the right
places. While writing web pages is a simple procedure, writing a web page that
gets noticed and picked up then relevance ranked successfully by different
search engines is a rather more complicated job.
· Make sure that
your site is registered with search engines
· Create links from your
pages to other sites, and encourage them to link back
Questions:
How do people find your website at the
moment?
What are you doing on the web to increase your visibility?
What
are you doing off the web to increase your visibility?
Do you think you
need to do more, or are you satisfied with your statistics?
Once people find your website, they'll come and visit. Your key tasks at this point are to ensure that they stay on the site for as long as possible, they become involved with it, start interacting with you, and perhaps mostly importantly they come back in the future on a regular basis. Obviously, in order to do this, there are a variety of key skills that you need to learn, mainly in the field of web design and authorship, but I'll leave my lecture on writing web pages for another day.
Practical exercise You will be given a hard copy brochure or flyer. Decide who the audience is, what the keywords are, and so on. Ask yourself how the hard copy needs to be changed in order to put it onto the web. Draw up (on paper) a web page that could be taken by a webmaster or consultant so that they can produce a web page.
Who do you want to visit your site?
This depends very much on
the answers that you have already come up with. Existing customers and clients,
potential customers, people interested in your subject area who may never have
heard of you, organisations, individuals, different groups, and so on. If you
are a large general library, with one or two specialisms your groups might look
a little like this:
Librarians (Acquisition, subject, serial, technical,
general etc)
Researchers
Publishers
General users (in your area, or
world-wide)
Potential sponsors
and so on. Create your list, and then
prioritise it. If you want to promote an image as a library specialising in the
work of modern American poets, researchers may well take higher priority than
casual users. Emphasis this in the structure of your pages, and the weighting
that you give in your guidance.
How are these users going to know you're to be trusted? Don't forget what I mentioned earlier - you cannot take it on trust that your viewer knows who you are. You must hammer this home at each opportunity. Use your company logo, university crest and so on to reinforce this. If you've won the Queens Award for Industry, make sure everyone who visits knows this, although on this site, its a little buried, but at least its there! You have to prove, then reassure your viewers that you are to be trusted, and that your data is reliable. You must also do this on every single page that you publish - there is no telling which page a user will arrive at first, so be consistent on the positioning of your logo, and put it on every page.
Once we've got them, what do we do with them?
You've got less
than 15 seconds to make an impact before they're gone. You have to work very
hard in this small window of opportunity. Don't let them go quite yet! Don't
have huge flashy graphics that take forever to load. I don't wait for them to
appear on my screen, and I'll bet that you don't either. Get some information
up there immediately for them to read while your graphics are loading.
Make it quite clear what your site is for. If you don't know, your viewers won't. This is where the image business is vital. Give them enough guidance to let them work their own way(s) through your site. I've talked more about this in another article on my home page; do you want to have a narrow and deep site, or a broad and narrow one? (If this doesn't make sense to you, don't worry - I talk about it later on!).
What you do with them, or what they do with you is going to depend on what you want to achieve. If you want them to buy something, tempt them in, get them interested, and then go for the sell. If you want to give them information, get it to them fast.
The purposes of web sites.
User's perspectives
Browser - try various versions of browsers, not just one, or one version
Speed, technical - how quickly do your pages load? How large are your
graphics?
Speed, content - broad and shallow pages, or narrow and deep?
Truth - accuracy, authority and currency
Communication - how can people
talk back to you?
Other functionality - advantages and disadvantages of new
technology
What's coming next?
Aesthetics - I think I'll pass on that
one!!
Authors' perspectives
The message - what is the
message, and is it in the first 25 words on each page?
Clarity,
consistency, authority and the rest
Aesthetics and truth
Provoke
responses - guest books, mailing lists, emails, return visits
Measure
effectiveness - as above, statistics
Get seen - this can be checked by
search engines, Alexa etc
Differences from other media - atoms V digits
Suitability for different messages
Getting seen
Writing web pages that are found by search
engines
· URL
· Title
· Meta tags
·
First paragraph
· Headings
· Keywords
·
Repetition
· Popularity
Practical exercise: Run a search on AltaVista for your web site. Where does your website get returned in the list of results found by AltaVista? What does the summary of your web page say? How many people link to you? Who has done better than you, and can you work out why? When you've done this for AltaVista, try it for another search engine, such as Yahoo, HotBot, Lycos etc and see if the results are different.
Navigation
Your site needs to easy to move around, with
appropriate links. Remember that each page has to stand on its own merits. Do
your links make sense, and is it clear that people know where they're going? Be
wary if you're using Frames on your site. Use colour to good effect.
Browser capacity
Different browsers. Different versions of
browsers. Are you going to write for one browser, or for all of them?
What is your competition doing?
Let us now turn briefly to
have a look at your competition what are they doing, who is visiting them, how
many people link into their services and so on. A very useful resource that can
be used here is an Intelligent Agent called Alexa, which is available from
http://www.alexa.com. Basically, it is a
piece of software that you download onto your machine and when you're using the
Internet it is constantly talking to its home base to find out information
about the site that you are visiting. You can use it to find out how many other
Alexa users visit the site in question, who the site is registered to, how
large the site is and how often it is updated. Admittedly, this is not indepth
information, and you could get most of it from other sources, but its a quick
and easy start. Interestingly, you can also view statistics of other Alexa
viewers (anonymously, of course), to see who likes and dislikes a site. This
can be very useful information when you are planning your own, of course!
Finally, you can also use Alexa to give you an indication of where people go to
when they leave that particular site, so it is reasonably easy to build up a
picture of the browsing habits of their users.
Of course, you can go further than that, and visit a few search engines yourself to see who is linking to a site AltaVista for example has a useful switch called <link:site_url> which allows you to see how many people are linking to a particular site. This again can prove to be a useful basis for obtaining valuable information about your competitors; how seriously they take the Internet, and how seriously they are taken by other people.
Note: This section is found at:http://www.philb.com/webdesig.htm
Text
Hypertext
Graphics
Sound files
Multimedia
Webcams
Java
ActiveX
Digicams
Digital video
E-commerce
Newsgroups
Mailing lists
Chat rooms
Questions: What are the best ways of utilising these
options?
Should you use these options, and which ones?
How can you use
them to their best advantage?
Are there drawbacks in using these, and if
so, what?
Practical exercise Returning to the flyer or other hard copy document you have already worked on - discuss some of the ways in which you can make it more interactive. Be imaginative!
Creating content
How do you establish what information to put
on your web pages? Who is your target audience? How many of them use the
Internet? What are your key messages? What are these in plain English and from
the readers viewpoint What links should you have to other web pages? What links
should you have to other sites?
Key messages Events the user can
take part in
Information you can obtain for the user
Training you can
arrange for the user
Projects you can manage for the user
Questions: Who is your intended audience?
How do
you attract them to your site?
How do you publicise your site?
What
kinds of information and services are available?
What is the theme of your
web site; who is it for and why?
How does the presentation of your site
help/hinder this?
Which of your web pages are most popular?
What
information don't you put on your site, and why?
How are you going to
attract new users?
Whatever else the web is or is not, it can be interactive. Your web site has the potential for being a key way in which customers tell you about your products, make suggestions and pass on ideas. Even a simple mailto: form on your site gives people an opportunity of talking to you, but you can do a considerable amount besides this. Why not set up a mailing list that people can join? This allows you to inform them of new pages or products, seek feedback, send out announcements, run competitions and so forth. Alternatively, run a listserv, allowing customers to participate in company activities. Since email is a reasonably fast method of communication you'll be able to get very quick feedback on ideas, new designers or projects that you may have.
Alternatively, you may decide that you want to go one better, and
establish a survey on your website. Such a survey can take almost any form that
you can imagine -
· Internet/Intranet
· Email
·
Online
· Customer feedback
· Research
·
Political or other opinion poll
· Feedback
· Online
ordering
These are not difficult to set up; you could either use a ready made CGI script from a website such as http://www.cgi-resources.com or create your own poll using the services of a company such as InfoPoll, located at http://www.infopoll.com
A successful web site is not an attractive one. Its not one full of the latest web technology. Its not even (in most cases) how many people visit it. Its how many come back, and come back time and time again. They may come back because its attractive, or they want to see the moving animation's again, in which case you've gone about it all the right way. However, you have to ask yourself the question 'What can I do to encourage users to come back?' Take another look at your image - what are you known for, and does your organisation have any slight peculiarities? Does it sponsor a particularly brilliant football team? Is it associated with the weather, such as Legal and General? Make a point of providing that sort of information to the viewer.
If you want a good reputation on the Web, take the time to establish a good launchpad. If you are known (or want to be known) for business information for example, put together a lot of links to business sites. People will come back to you because you've done the hard work for them, and it will also increase your authority as well.
You should create a list of the things that you do, and do well. Also make a note of what you are known for. Take a market research company for example. You could provide free samples of your latest reports. You might decide to carry out a monthly poll, and get people to fill out a form asking for their opinions (that's always a winner; I can't resist giving people my opinion, and I'm sure that goes for most of us). Provide links to current awareness services - if you are the type of market research company that works in the political field have links to the newspapers, political parties, information on elections and so on. Provide links to discussion groups and listservs.
If you do all of that, you should have a lively, interesting site which is a joy to visit, and an incentive to come back. Slip in some information about the reports that you have for sale, or a conference you are organising or whatever, people will be kept up to date, and as a result, may well buy a product or report you have for sale.
Above all, keep your site current. This is vital, so I'm going to say it again. Keep your site current. Update it at least once a week, or once a day if you can afford the staff time. If the site is old, or carries out of date information, it shows that you don't care. If you don't care, why should you expect your user to care? One of the sites which I look after is updated at least once a month with new details of courses taking place, and if a new one comes up at short notice, I'll update it there and then. Use graphics to show that something is new, revised, updated or whatever.
Right. That's enough of designing the page. If you want more, you are welcome to read my article on design elements that you need to take into consideration. What I'd like to do now is concentrate on the mechanics of the thing, and all the important behind the scenes work that you don't normally find out until you actually start to run a site. Make sure that you consider each of the following points and work out your own answers to them, because if you don't do it at the outset, you'll have to do it half way through the project, and that way lies insanity.
Copyright
When you produce a page of text you, or your
organisation will automatically own the copyright. It makes sense to put a
copyright notice at the bottom of each page however, or perhaps a copyright
statement stating what people can or cannot do with the material on your site.
If you are tempted to use material from another web page (particularly
graphics) make sure that what you want to use is in the public domain, or that
you get permission from the copyright owner to use the material on your site.
Links You can put links from your pages to any other site on the Web. There are a number of cases going through various courts around the world at the moment, so I would suggest that before you do so, you contact the Webmaster of the site(s) concerned and ask for permission. Please also remember that other people can link directly to your site without your knowledge. You can however do searches on a variety of search engines to see what sites have linked to you; in Altavista for example, the syntax is <link:site_url>
What are the key activities and who can do them?
What can you
do yourselves, and what skills must you acquire?
The image element may well
come from the PR or Communications department
The technical element of
writing Java or cgi scripts and putting it up onto a server may well be the
responsibility of your technical department. If you are hosting the server,
since you must take into account the security issues, create firewalls and so
on.
Writing copy can come from anyone, any department, anywhere. They must
however make sure they commit to doing this on a regular basis. They also need
to know how to write for the web - it is very different to writing in hard
copy. Consequently, someone needs to teach them how to do this. You'll probably
need to obtain an authoring tool to transfer text into HTML.
Someone has to
be the Webmaster, Webmistress, or some other damn fool title. They need to
have, or be given the authority to update the site, request and receive new
copy and so on. You might want to have an 'editorial board'
Who is going to
keep it all up to date? They must be able to write the pages and keep abreast
of new and breaking technologies to keep the site fresh and interesting.
Money money money...
How much is it going to cost to set up and
maintain? Who is going to pay for it? Where is the staff time going to come
from?
How will we cope with the impact it will have on the organisation?
Who is going to answer the email enquiries? And how? How is information about
the success of the site going to be transmitted internally? Who is going to
tell the world about it? How is the site going to be evaluated and by who? How
is the role of the Webmaster/mistress going to fit into the hierarchy? How are
new ideas going to be transmitted to the editorial board? To what extent are
you going to involve other people within your organisation?
Questions:
Does your website currently reflect everything
that you do?
Who in your office needs to know about the website?
Do
they need to be able to use it, and/or the Internet?
How are they going to
be trained/encouraged to use it?
Can people access the site from your
offices?
Do they need to?
How can you facilitate this, if it's
necessary?
Commissioning pages Using a consultant or designer.
Questions: What do you need to ask them? What do you need to tell
them? Contract - what to include?
Once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Informing your audience of changes to the site Using a mailing list Using Netmind Keeping older pages current.
Who has responsibility? Ease of updating
Practical elements
Proofing
House style
Identity in
the real world
Site plan
Use of non-textual content
Levels/arrays
Explicit updating
Point, don't copy
Feedback
Maintenance
schedule
Writing for the screen
Copyright clearance
Housekeeping
inside pages
Titles of pages
Standard elements
Other design issues.
Pictures, graphics, size, number,
alternative text
Dependence on optionally loaded content
Colour
Frames
Writing for browsers and versions of browsers
Templates
Navigation: consistency, internal pointers, link styles, warnings
|
|
|||
| Category | Total pts | Assessment area | Breakdown |
| Currency | 4 | Are your date fields filled in? This means that each file should have update and delete dates included in the <head> field | all pages 2 some=1 None=0 |
| The information in each page is current | all pages 2 some=1 None=0 |
||
| Structure | 3 | Does the web team have a structure diagram of how your pages fit together? | yes=1 no=0 |
| Each page should not be less than 6 lines or more than 6 screens long | all pages 2 some=1 None=0 |
||
| Spelling | 2 | Are there any spelling mistakes on the pages? | yes=0 no=2 |
| Links | 3 | 5+ links to external sites | 1 |
| 10+ links to external sites | 2 | ||
| 15+ links to external sites | 3 | ||
| Coordinator | 2 | Your organisation has a named Web coordinator known to the organisation. | 2 |
| Review | 2 | Pages checked after updates? | yes=2 no=0 |
| Interactivity | 3 | Contact information on all pages follows the format used on standard contact information pages | yes=1 no=0 |
| Application or feedback forms | yes=1 no=0 |
||
| Other types of interactivity, eg quiz | yes=1 no=0 |
||
| Multimedia | 2 | Photos, sound and video are included if appropriate. | yes=1 no=0 |
| File sizes of photos etc are low, eg a colour photo should not exceed 30k | yes=1 no=0 |
||
| House style | 5 | Editorial house style is rated, 1=lowest, 5=highest Notice taken of address formats, capitalization, telephone number formats, and frequently queried words. |
Up to 5 pts |
| HTML quality | 5 | 1=lowest 5=highest. Particular notice being taken of correctly closed tags, HEIGHT/WIDTH for graphics, ALT tags specified relative paths used, file names in lower case, special characters are referred to using the numerical codes | Up to 5 pts |
Ensure authority by using all the following:
An appropriate domain
name
Logos and other copyright materials
Contact details
Currency
Links from other sites
At this point I want to begin by looking at the kind of information you
can glean from your visitors, and how you can use it to your best
advantage.
The statistical data held on your web server can be a perfect
mine of information. Depending on how you set it up, and the software you use
to interrogate the data (I use a product called NetIntellect from
http://www.webmanage.com) you can find
out information such as:
General summaries
Visitor profile by origin
Top requested files
Activity - by hour/day/week
Host reports
Top visitors by country
Top referring URLs
Browsers
Platforms
This data can also be broken down further, with an emphasis on technical issues, marketing, press/publicity and so on. Consequently, with very little effort on your part you can obtain very detailed information about your users and potential markets. The data can also be used very effectively to provide feedback on the progress of your site; it's easy to see what your popular pages/products are, those pages which are not visited, the effectiveness of links and your positioning with different search engines. I would make one caution at this point however; you will probably end up with some useful email addresses and personal details on people - do not be tempted to use this to send unsolicited email to your visitors, since it will ensure that they think twice about coming back!
There are a lot of ways of generating revenue from your website. Here
are a few possibilities:
· Online ordering - materials, courses,
bookings
· Promoting - events, your organisations facilities
· Linking to other Internet sites such as Amazon
· Taking
paid advertising on your pages
· Renting out some of your web space
· Running a virtual exhibition alongside a live
conference/exhibition
Practical exercise: Discuss the ideas mentioned above. Are they appropriate for your site? What would work/wouldn't work? Any other ideas for generating revenue from your site? Have any of your competitors done anything?
Tools to help webmasters. This text is found at http://www.philb.com/webtools.htm.
Questions:
What have you been doing right so far?
What
do you want to change in the future?
What is the role of your website now,
and will it be changing?
Who does what?
What are you going to stop
doing to free up time?
What have you learned from the course?