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Building Your Web Site
by by Butch Blasingame January 2001 Hal-PC Magazine www.hal-pc.org/journal - January 21, 2001 at 18:52:12:
A New Year’s ResolutionThe bottom-line at the top.
It’s the start of a new year and this year I have a personal resolution. I intend to always try for a WOW page. We’ve all seen them: Web pages that you couldn’t wait to e-mail the link to your friends. A real discovery that you had to tell them about. It’s time to take a step back from the nuts and bolts of web building and think! What makes a page one of those “You gotta see this!” WOW pages? While some factors are subjective, dealing with personal tastes and interests, there are several that are universal in making a site on the Web a place that people will go back to again and again
Content, Content, Content—It’s the Information Age. People have an insatiable appetite for information that they’re interested in. If you have that info, someone will want it. Sites that range from the most important life and death issues to totally trivial stuff are ones that people buzz about. What makes the difference is real info and lots of it. Things that the everyday person doesn’t know. Fresh content is a necessity because info is a perishable commodity. It goes stale very quickly after a couple of times of being opened, just like fresh bread.
Making a Connection—Speed, speed, and more speed. Nobody likes to wait. If you are one of those unfortunately “bandwidth-challenged” surfers that still make up the majority of those online, you probably already think you sit and stare at nothing way too long. Any web site that doesn’t get you at least something you can look at in the first few seconds is going to lose a lot of people. I was in a meeting of e-commerce web developers a couple of months ago and they referred to the “six-second rule.” In other words, if you don’t get your home page across in some understandable way in that first few seconds, the surfer catches the next wave. That sounds a little quick, but really, have you timed six seconds lately? We’ve all seen stuff we’ve had to wait for; pages that load in entirety before they are displayed, Flash movies that take a long time with a little “loading” sign on the screen, and beautiful graphics that make the little slide graph at the bottom corner of your browser crawl to a stop. In a perfect world, this marriage of art and science would be great, but in the WWW, it just doesn’t work. If you’ve got something that people have to wait for, then it had better be great.
Sites like Yahoo and MP3.com get this and open up with simple, fast, and well organized pages with tons of info and small graphics. They are masters at getting something on the screen in a hurry with lots of links so that you can go lots of places. It ain’t pretty, but it works. I’m not saying that you need to copy them, but just be smart about how long your home page loads.
Concept—When people look at a really great page, they know three things instantly. One is what the page is about. Two is how to get around. The third is whether this page has its act together. I don’t know how many pages that have info on widgets that I have been to that at first, second, and sometimes third glance made me wonder why a search engine would have sent me there for widgets. So good old stating the obvious is always good. A picture is worth a thousand words. The second item, navigation, is usually not such a problem. Finding the site controls is usually easy, but determining where you’re going from the labels on them isn’t always so easy. Again, you can’t beat plain and simple. The third thing has to do with things like, “Do you see the full page on the first screen? Do you have to scroll around a lot? Does animation add to the page or just distract you?” Movement is usually good. But if it’s tacked onto the lower priority elements on the page and upstages what’s important, then it’s better left off.
Community—What I call “people feel”. Some of the Web’s best sites give you this feeling. It feels like other people go there and are there. It’s obvious because they invite you to become part of the page. Inter-active is the buzzword here. If you can let people know that you’re glad they came to see you, you have a sure winner. Give them a way to share in the experience. Let them express themselves. Give them the “stage.” As they become part of the “community,” they will naturally invite others to go to your site because they will have ownership in it. Good old word of e-mail (mouth in Cyberland) is always the best publicity anyone can ever get. In some ways this new world of the Web isn’t so new after all and what worked in the past is still what works—even if it manifests itself in a different manner. That’s because you still reach people through ways that matter to them, whether the communication vehicle is as old as a clay tablet or as new as the LCD screen.
Let’s resolve to reach people this year with web pages that matter—WOW pages!
What do you think makes a great page? I’d like to know…
Butch Blasingame is a member of HAL-PC and may be reached at butchb@butchb.com. He invites your comments, questions, and suggestions. For resources and links to information, software, and downloads mentioned in this article, visit www.butchb.com on the World Wide Web.
Or e-mail me at mfoster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have.
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