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UT ADV 391K - The Good, Bad, and Ugly

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- By Joel SnyderThe Good,Bad, andUglyHow many frustrating, obnoxious, and useless Web pages have youencountered? Before you launch a site, take the time to do it right.‘Where's the beef.'—Clara PellerYOU HAVE DECIDED TO HAVE A WEB PRESENCE. BUT DID YOU really plan the idea out on paper first? Or did you think thatthrowing some great copy and artwork on the site would make it good? Before you waste your time and that of thepeople who will visit your Web site, read the following tips.Know Your GoalBeing on the Web is not your goal. If you think it is, think again. Create a clearly defined goal, write it down, and stareat it for a couple of hours. Your goal should be specific and detailed.Too many people want to create a Web page with the idea of "marketing on the Internet" or to offer "customersupport and education." Those concepts are a start, but you need to have a clearer idea of what you want to do. If not,your Web site will be vague, ill-defined, and probably confusing. Even if you're not offering up information forcommercial reasons, you need to come up with a goal statement. Are you trying to be a quick-in, quick-out place wherepeople can get information? Are you encouraging people to keep visiting again and again? Are you marketing?Educating?Once you have a goal, keep it in mind as you create every single page. In fact, each page should have its own goal.Why is this page here? What do I hope to accomplish? How can I best present the information? When a page is done,put it aside for a while and then come back to it and ask yourself, "Does this page meet its own goals? Does this pagefurther the goals of the site?" If the answer to either is "no," then something is wrong.Content CountsI can't say this enough times. Every site needs information— something to justify the bits it consumes in the globalether. I've visited too many sites in which you wander around five or 10 pages to find that at the very bottom there isn'tanything to see.Content is king. If you've got content, show it. If you don't have anything to say, don't let those HTML files off yourhard disk. If you have bust enough content for one page then keep itat that. "Under construction" pages and content-free pages ("click here to see a picture of an empty Web page") wastevisitors' time and bandwidth.Of course, there could be divergent views on whether what you have to say is useful or not. If it isn't, you could endup on the Useless Pages, which is not where I want to be when I grow up.While you're at it, give us a rest from guestbooks, feedback buttons, hit counter odometers, awards proclaimingyour page is in the "top 5 percent of Web sites," and other useless drivel that some sites use as self congratulation. Ifyour site is good and useful, people will know it (and you'll know it).Graphics Are a WasteOK, they're not all a waste. Graphics can be useful. But generally, Web designers stick useless and bandwidth-hogginggraphics on their pages without thinking about whether they further the goal of the page or just take up space.If you're going to stick graphics on your pages, make them useful. Dorky little icons instead of simple bullets arenot useful. Huge banners letting the world see (in 16-bit color, no less) your corporate logo are not useful.Image maps are a particularly insidious form of graphics because they're so completely useless if everything doesn'twork exactly right. There are lots of sites I run into that have nothing other than image maps on their front page. If Ihappen to be running without graphics turned on (which I do to speed things up), I have no idea of what is going onthere.If you're going to use image maps like that, make sure you add text buttons for people to push. Or give people thealternative of taking a text-only path through your Web site. Look at Sun's home page http://www.sun.com orDigital's (http://www.digital.com for an example of how this can be done. Hint: Try turning off image loading inyour browser or use a text-only browser like Lynx before testing these links. If you do support a text-only path, makesure it works through the entire site.Icons are one place where some Web designers commit heinous crimes. All icons should have text descriptionsbuilt into...............................................................................................26 INTERNET World APRIL 1996I each one. Web sites are not like word processing packages; they L aren't visited so often that people really learn theicons used within. A good icon has some graphical element that indicates its function, and it has a text element thatmakes the meaning crystal clear. Bad icons, like bad graphics, are worse than useless—they hinder the use of your site.Keep in mind that lots of people are on slow phone lines, have slow browsers, or don't have the time to wastewaiting for your graphics to load. If your page doesn't make sense without graphics, redesign it.I'm no graphics guru, but I know that good Web designers make an effort to intelligently reduce the color depth ofan image to make it load quickly. Good designers also know when to use GIF files (for things like graphs and line art)as well as JPEG files (for things like photographs). Beware of JPEG files, though, as not all browsers support inlinedisplay of JPEGs. This means that to see a JPEG, the user may have to click on it to launch a separate application oropen a second window. That makes Jpegs the worst possible choice for image maps.Give the Site an OverviewPeople who enter your site want to find the information they need quickly. Don't think of your Web site as a garden tobe wandered through slowly and enjoyed just for the elegance of its layout. Think of your Web site as a conveniencestore, where people want to get in, find the information they're looking for, and get out as fast as they can. Help them byproviding an overview of the site.When you build the home page of a Web site, show users a map of the site by providing links that clearly indicatewhat's going to happen. Ask yourself: Is it clear what the readers are going to find by following each of the links? Keeplinks on the home page of a site relevant to the site so they don't cause more confusion than benefit.You may want to have an elegant and leisurely feel for most of your Web site. That's fine. Just give the user somewarning that this is what they're getting into. And if you're trying to market a product or service, consider building ashortcut through your garden so people can


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