Brain Candy #12 - Designing a Web Site

The most important concern in my opinion is content. There are many purely vanity sites on the web. Typically, you'll see a "Welcome to My Web Page" banner, a few family photos, a biography or two and an e-mail address which you can use to contact the authors. There's nothing wrong so far, but that's all the site has. If you're friends or family of these folks, you might be interested, but there's nothing here to draw a crowd. If you want people to visit your site, you've got to do better. A site that is too much in the common interest is also a problem. If you want to do a site on the Titanic or a tribute site to Princess Diana, you're going to get lost in the crowd. From another perspective, would you have anything unique to say about these topics? If you're a poet or wish to make a personal comment, you might be justified, otherwise you're not likely to add anything new to the Web. What I suggest is that you pick topics where you have personal expertise, or at least personal experience and which are of more limited interest. I use a rule of thumb; if one person in one thousand might be interested in a topic, I feel it's worth developing. That translates to tens of thousands of potential visitors for your site. Because this topic is more obscure, it may be sparsely covered on the Web. But remember that you have to have content, something unique to say. Even if your contribution is modest, it may still be of value to someone. An added bonus you can provide to your visitors are links to other sites that cover the topic. You should do some research on what's already available on the Web before you build a site: share it!

Take care in how you present your information. Allow your visitors to get in quickly, survey what you have to offer and decide to get more involved or leave with a minimum investment of time. You can have large graphic images, but allow visitors to preview them with a thumbnail version on your top page. I knew someone who put a huge graphic on his top page - this was several years ago when modem speeds were slower. This was bad enough, but once it loaded, you saw a very commonly available picture of an astronaut standing on the moon facing the American flag. A neat picture admittedly, but he shanghaied his visitors with no info about what they were getting until they had wasted their time loading it. I would guess that few ever knew what it was; they left first.

The HTML standard provides many tools, some of which should rarely if ever be used. The "blink" command comes to mind. Bump up the font size, bold the text and set it to blink and you could drive a saint into a rage. Other things, like animated gifs have some legitimate uses, but they can slow up your guests' visit greatly if overused or too large and if misused they can be very annoying. Use them with care.

I would say that simplicity is generally a good policy, especially on your front page. Things should load fast, providing hints of the meat that lies further down in your site. I'm not saying that you shouldn't make things pretty or flashy, but don't get distracted from the information you want to convey. That's what the thinking people are after.

A good site to start with to further investigate issues like this is the Great Web Site Design Tips page at http://www.unplug.com/great/. It has some good advice and a lot of excellent links to other sites like the Bandwidth Conservation Society and Web Wonk.

Next time, I plan an in-depth analysis of an actual web site. It will be Catherine's and my site at http://home.neo.rr.com/catbar/ . I'll discuss how it started, how it grew, how the above principles were applied, what's wrong with it and where I see us going with it. Take an advanced peek at it if you want. Until then, happy hunting.