Tech Support Topics

7 DOs and 7 DON'Ts
for a Successful Site

Seven DON'Ts for a Successful Website

1. Don't fail to provide. Have content your target audience wants. Whether it's knowledge or entertainment or a certain product line, your web site content is why they came to your site. Give them the content they're after.
2. Don't dissappoint. When someone is looking for a certain item or information on a certain topic and they find a reference to your site, say in a search on Lycos or Webcrawler, don't dissappoint them when they visit you and see "Sorry, this site under construction. We'll be up in a few days... etc." Get your site ready before you publicize.
3. Don't aggravate. If your home page doesn't load in 30 seconds or less, you are going to bug the crap out of whoever trys to visit. Think about it. When you're browsing the web, you don't want to sit staring at a blank browser window while an 84K jpeg slowly fills the screen, just to see a fuzzy snapshot of somebody's recently caught trophy bass. Make your homepage light and fast. Give visitors the option to step inside your web site if they choose. But don't waste their time or try their patience.
4. Don't offend. No, I don't mean go to extra lengths to be politically correct on all points. Just use proper "netiquette" (oooh, I hate those buzzwords, especially "cyber..anything" and "information super.." never mind.) Also, avoid what I just did - grouching and acting superior. Don't act like the Internet is your personal property and everything on it must meet your approval (as some old timers still do, especially those that can't stand business on the 'Net) -there I go again...
5. Don't forget. Don't forget to update your site, if you promised regular updates. Don't forget to check your mail if you have a form on your site that sends you comments from visitors. Don't forget to finish that page and add that link that you thought you already did Ñ Oops. Don't forget to try your newly uploaded site out as if you were a first time visitor.
6. Don't Confuse. How do you like those pages you see with no links to anywhere? Not much, huh? How about web sites that are so huge and haphazardly thrown together you get lost or go in circles? What about imagemap graphics that don't look like imagemaps? Make your site easy to navigate, easy to find and easy to leave. If you have more than one purpose for your site, try making a subsite within your site and think of it as a separate local. In other words, if you're selling cars, don't park your vegetable stand between the cars.
7. Don't move. Don't move your site to another URL without leaving a forwarding link up. If you do move, make sure you notify all referencing links to your pages.

   G.C.

Seven DOs for a Successful Website

1. Do provide what people want. Your content is the most important ingredient in your site. Bad presentation with good content beats good presentation with poor content any day. Keep it fresh, too. Regular updates to your site keep people coming back.
2. Do design for all browsers (both people and software). Get the sorriest browser you can find to test your site before you upload it. Try the original Mosaic or AOL's web browser, the early versions that don't support recent html extensions, like tables. If your site looks good on the AOL browser, chances are it'll look GREAT using a recent version of Netscape. Also, don't forget that people are the ultimate browsers. Watch those loud background images that make text hard to read. A personal preference: I like left justified copy much better that centering everything and your dog in the browser window. Left justified just feels more natural.
3. Do publicize your site. Publicize, publicize, publicize. Submit your URL to all the search engines, search sites, content archives, online classified pages, free add-a-link pages, link exchanges, etc, etc. you can find. This is hard work, believe me. You might even want to hire your teenage son to do it (check on him occasionally to make sure he's not viewing www.xxx.com or picking up divorcees on irc)
4. Do measure the hits to your site. Change your strategy if you're not getting hits. Put a counter on at least your home page to measure page hits. Ask for access reports from your presence provider. Remember, everybody and his dog and his bone has a web page these days, so it's kind of like giving everybody in the world $1,000. It doesn't change much unless you use it well and wisely.
5. Do do something different. Nope, I don't want to see another "basic html how-to" page. Now, if you can show me how to make my web pages do neat tricks with ONLY html, yeah, I want to see that. I don't want to see another empty classified ads page. Nope, don't want to see another "my favorite links" page (unless you're Charles Manson or the Pope). I don't want to see a single page site with a company logo and phone number and nothing else. Do something different. Put a counter on the toilet handle in your dorm bathroom and output a graphical representation of the frequency of toilet flushes versus what they're serving in the cafeteria. Let me order items I can't get anywhere else, like the little mouse ball and covering ring somebody stole off my Mac's mouse. (And an Apple brand dtb mouse costs, buddy).
6. Do think of new ways to do things. Don't use metaphors for everything you do on the web, such as onine magazine, store, library, etc. Define new presentations. Examples? I don't know. If I told you they wouldn't be original, would they? Remember, the web is new. It's evolving.
7. Do introduce others to the Internet and to computing in general. After all, if more people are online, there'll be more to visit your site, right?

   G.C.

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