Content and community are two of the most important buzzwords in Web design. Content is everything you put up on your Web site from hyperlinks to corporate information and graphics to e-mail buttons. The community is that group of surfers who come to know your site as being worthy of interest, recommend it to their friends and colleagues, or otherwise become part of your Internet ‘family’. Content is probably the most important consideration when you are creating a Web site. Not only do you want to get your message across, but with the increasing pressure of information overload in this new interactive age, you need be unique in the presentation of your material. The average person who uses the Internet is already well aware of the amount of information available. S/he needs a compelling reason not only to visit your site but to return and, hopefully, purchase your wares. Although the look of your site is obviously important, content and the development of community are what determine whether a visitor will return to or bookmark the site.

Developing a Community

Developing a community is the key factor, not only in bringing new customers onboard, but also as a way of maintaining customer loyalty. In Cyberspace, as the saying goes, no one knows you’re a dog, but every dog belongs to a pack, and the aim of your enterprise is to attract that pack of hungry beasts to your site. There are a number of ways you can do this, some subtle and some not so.

Give it a Subject

All forms of communication are about something, whether that form is a book, a film or even a Web site. So whether your Web site’s subject is engineering, soap powder or financial services, you have something to offer your visitors.

Provide a history of the development of the product or service. Give background details on how it was developed and the history of the field you ‘re covering. If you are a manufacturer of aeroplane components, for example, the history of man’s fumbling attempts to become one with the birds is a rich vein of comic and historical interest just waiting to be mined. Hyperlink to a list of FAQ’s to enable your visitor to understand the field quickly.

Provide a Service

One of the reasons people visit a site is because they’re interested in the field you are working in. Provide a service your viewers can’t get elsewhere, such as job information, company news, a newsletter about the industry or service and links to other sites with relevant information.

AccountingNet at www.accountingnet.com is an excellent example of such a site. Not content with just providing information about its services, it also provides access to a wide range of archived information such as research, government departments, a discussion forum, a recruitment board, and a search engine that assists in locating a chartered accountant on a regional basis. As such, AccountingNet is probably an accountant’s idea of heaven, or at least contact with a virtual angel, but it is also providing a much needed service to the rest of us.

Strangely enough, it is often the professions such as accountancy that seem to be most conscious of the importance of providing useful content and service, as the Jackson Batten site at jbi.co.uk/ demonstrates. A newsletter, opinion columns and even a competition, which lets you ‘help the environment’, make this a rich site, well worth exploring.

Another site that provides a service is the www.jermynstreet.com guide to the famous London shopping nirvana for City types. Alongside listings for all the different establishments, the site provides maps of the area, contact numbers for tourist authorities, weather information, a currency converter and a history of the locale. These added features not only enhance the Web site’s attraction to its clients, the establishments of Jermyn Street, but also the potential client, by providing essential and useful information.

Help the Press

Archive your press releases on a separate page and update them regularly. Offer a press release service that sends out news about your company upon registration. Provide a separate e-mail for journalists so that you do not confuse clients.

Run Regular Features

Regular features such as competitions, giveaways and promotional offers will keep visitors coming back regularly. Provide a form where interested participants can enter their details, and send them e-mail notices before you start a new promotion. Prizes can be in the form of promotional gifts such as pens, T-shirts, baseball caps and other material that you would normally supply at trade exhibitions and conferences. Doing this enables you to place the all-important word ‘FREE’ in your meta tags.

Be Different

Just because you are selling something doesn’t mean you can’t be an individual. Like television and the cinema, although both can be informative, the Internet is also about entertainment. Perhaps the chairman of the company is a model train enthusiast. Provide a page for him to share his interest with other like-minded individuals. If the company competes in any form of out of office activities such as sports, pub quizzes or annual outings, provide information on these topics.

Make It Fun

In terms of revenue, the games industry already surpasses both Hollywood and the publishing industry combined, and over the next few years it’s set to explode into a new generation of growth online. Take a tip from these marketing masters and make your site enjoyable. Games, quizzes and crosswords based around the theme of your site will attract interest and assist in spreading the word.

There are a number of simple shareware, or even freeware, games that you can incorporate into your Web site quite cheaply. Visit shareware.miningeo.com/library/weekly/aaO72197.htm for a good selection of Java based entertainment or go to www.developercom/directories/ pages/dirjava.html for a more in depth look at the subject.

Sound files, graphics, QuickTime movies and other Web tools can be used, but not to the extent that pages take hours to download, especially if they’re not particularly impressive when they do. If you can use Flash instead of heavy GIFs and animations, do so.

Make it Easy to Get in Touch

Always place an e-mail link on every page, not just the first. If you are providing an online form for customers’ orders, provide telephone, fax and addresses for people who are still wary of ordering over the Net. A new service from NetCall (www.netcaliple.com) called SomeOne provides a clever solution to long distance callers. It enables you to place a button on your Web site, which when clicked causes the telephone of both the merchant and the customer to ring, at no cost to the browsing caller. You can also involve your customers by providing a guest book.

Link to Other Sites

By this time you should have carried out some intensive research on the Web to find out how many other sites bear some relation to your own. Choosing carefully, see if you can arrange for a mutual link exchange. The Creswell Initiative site at www.creswell.co.uk/ is an excellent example of community building through linking to local history and special interest groups.

However, make sure you place any links like this on your last page so as to avoid visitors leaving your site prematurely and perhaps not returning.

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinking key words in your text can give greater depth to your site, and at the same time provide a richer experience for the visitor. You can highlight and link to weighty documents such as annual reports, sales figures or testimonials, without the risk of losing the viewer who doesn’t want this information from your site. In the early days of the Internet, when people needed to be given information on how to navigate the newly-created HTML documents, the words ‘click here’ were often embedded to point people in the right direction. Now that people have greater familiarity with the Web, it is not only unnecessary but downright ugly. There are a number of other reasons why this practice should be avoided.

A hyperlink is supposed to be a keyword that, when clicked on, leads the user to another page containing more information regarding that word or phrase. In addition, a hyperlink is essentially a simple sign in itself, and when signs have signs pointing to them, it is usually a signal that they are not well designed. A hyperlink is a simple device and it should be absolutely clear how to use it. If your viewers need to be told where to click, you’ve obviously done something to confuse them.

Hyperlinks exist to draw attention to themselves. The visitor will focus on a hyperlink before reading the surrounding text, and if information about where the hyperlink leads is only found in the surrounding text, rather than in the word itself (such as Annual Report), you have created extra work for the user.

Finally, not everyone clicks. As is true of browsers, not everyone who surfs uses a mouse. Many people scan over the text looking for keywords in the hyperlinks to get to where they want to go. The ‘click here’ practice makes scanning for keywords impossible. If the page is printed out, ‘click here’ means absolutely nothing.

A Word Of Warning

You might be tempted to join one of the many ‘link exchange’ schemes that are in existence at the moment, as a way of either getting more exposure for your site or signalling that you are interested in carrying advertising or sponsorship banners. Think twice before you do so, and consider the following.

Internet Link Exchange, which is by far the most popular banner program, offers a scheme whereby for every 100 hits a page gets, 50 people will be invited to the site via the link exchange and 100 people will be invited to leave via the link exchange. Although you will probably see a marginal increase in hits to the site, it is also true that people who enter the site in this manner are equally likely to leave by it, ignoring your content or not exploring it fully. Twenty-five per cent of link exchange banners are made by professionals who pay to have the banners posted and have first-hand research specifically on the topic of link exchange banners.

Banner design is advancing rapidly, with slicker tricks to lure visitors away from the original hosting site. High-end animations, competitions and free offers are undoubtedly attractive, so giving away free advertising for a few more hits is hardly worth the candle. Diligence when registering with search engines and posting to newsgroups will reap greater rewards than what is essentially laziness.

Finally, there are aesthetic problems to consider, one of which is being forced to ‘design around’ an awkwardly shaped image. It’s impossible to take advantage of any kind of colour scheme, because each time the page is loaded, a new banner is loaded with its own set of colours. The banner will always look out of place on a well organised page.

Tips

Keep the pages as clean and uncluttered as possible, with no <blink> tags and other rubbish like that. Try and keep blocks of text to a minimum, people ‘s attention span is far less when reading from a screen. Decide on what font and colour scheme to use and then stick to that theme throughout the pages. Don’t load your pages with unnecessary GIFs and the like, and they’ll load faster. Don’t be frightened to experiment, or browse other peoples pages for ideas.

While scouting around for ideas to steal, try to get a feeling for similar sites out there and think about how you can add a different and unique slant to that. Also on a cautionary note, tempting though it is to stuff a site with sound samples and video clips do bear in mind that a lot of that will be in clear breach of copyright. You only have to spend a few minutes on the Web to see that this goes on all the time, but remember that if you are truly successful, and your site gets major public recognition, it may also bring you onto the lawyers’ radar screens. Either get legal, or be ready to pull any offending material.

Animated sites

Animated sites are all the rage, and additions to QuickTime and Macromedia Flash give you new ways to jazz up your site, so that you can entertain visitors or liven up an otherwise dull subject. But there are some things you should avoid when adding animation to your Web site and some you should include.

Make it Transparent

If you simply want an animated image, with the rest of the document staying the same, then GIF animation should do the trick. This is a way of storing multiple frames of an animation in one GIF file and is supported by newer browsers from Netscape 2 and Internet Explorer 2 up, to name but two.

Unfortunately, creating animated GIF’s can be extremely tedious and complicated, although this process is made easier by ‘wizards’, which you can find in most GIF animation programs. There are many such programs available, some of which will also enable you to create transparent GIF’s. These are images with ‘see-through’ parts that show the Web page's background colour or image. This enables you to create an image of, say, a red circle, and make it look as if the circle is ‘floating’ on top of the Web page's background instead of an ugly rectangle. Transparent GIF’s are supported by nearly all browsers.

Animate Your Text

Use animated GIF’s just like normal GIF’s, as inline animated images with the <IMG> tag and as animated links to other documents. Remember to keep your files as small as possible to speed the process.

Get Shocked

Shockwave plug-ins do one thing. That is play back Macromedia Director, Authorware and FreeHand files which are compressed for downloading from the Web. Director and Authorware files are interactive, animated files that, until recently, were only seen on CD-ROM’s. Generally, these files are too big to upload to the Intemet. So Macromedia, the company that created Director and Authorware, invented Afterburner, a program that compresses the files to Intemet size.You might be wondering exactly how big an 'Internet-sized' file is. Well, they vary greatly from 75K to as high as 300K.

Shockwave and Flash, the new addition to Macromedia's product range, are ideal if you want to make a strong, visual statement. Flash is better if you want a fast loading, graphics orientated effect, while Shockwave is more suited to photographic and other dense images.

Get Moving

QuickTime is the application of choice if you want to incorporate video and a kind of quasi-VR experience to your Web site. It’s of particular use to companies such as estate agents and travel companies and enables you to view panoramic scenes in a 360 degree ‘turn’. A new version, QuickTime 3, is currently available from Apple’s Web site at www.apple.com/quicktime.

QuickTime 3 can play back over 30 different audio and video file formats, and it offers real time streaming of digital content over the Internet. This enables Web surfers to view QuickTime movies from any Web server, without long download delays.

Point to Plug-ins

One problem with commercial Web-animation products such as Flash and QuickTime is that they need browser plug-ins, which in turn require version 2 of Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer at the least. Millions of people access the Web with other browsers, and even Navigator and Explorer users may lack the plug-in that you’ve used. Most plug-ins are free and widely available, but users may not want to download and install them.

Many plug-ins also impose a high memory overhead and can make browsers unreliable. If you use a plug-in format, be sure to include the URL on your page, so that visitors who don't have the plug-in can get it. Macromedia has recently added a new way of downloading the software, called Smart Shockwave.

This automates the selection, download, and installation of Shockwave players. And with the addition of the short JavaScript to the Get Shockwave button on a Web site, when visitors to the site click this Smart button, Smart Shockwave determines if the required Shockwave player is installed in their browsers. If not, Smart Shockwave launches a small status window as the Shockwave player automatically downloads and installs in the background. Smart Shockwave is compatible with Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 3 & 4.

Make a Cup of Coffee

Java enables you to invent mini programs called applets that run in your browser and work on any platform. Many companies are now using Java to replace functions formerly handled by PERL scripts and CGI, but there is a drawback in the use of memory.

Because Java programs run directly from the same memory space as the visitor's browsing programs, crashes are common, and irritating, to say the least. Although Java is intended to work on network systems of the future, it is still possible to create sites that can add a great deal to visitors' Web experience.

For instance, Dream Designs at (www.dream.com/) lets you interact with the site by offering a range of choices of backgrounds, font colours and spinning orbs to view and change directly on the site, and it even remembers what you set it for on your last visit and updates it instantly. That is, unless you’re a cookie-crusher or regularly clear out your cache and Temp files. This could be a real puller for sites that want people to come back regularly for information updates.

Provide a Choice

Not everyone is as motivated, or as enthralled by technology, as you are, which means some visitors won’t bother getting the plug-in. If you want to keep them happy, give them the option of downloading standard format versions of the sound or video whenever possible.

Watch out for Browsers

Animated GIFs do appear in browsers that don’t support GIF89a (the standard animated GIF format), but how they appears depends on the browser. The AOL browser displays only the last frame of the animation, but most other browsers, including Netscape Navigator 1.x and Internet Explorer 1.x, display only the first frame. The latter approach complicates life if you want to create, say, a logo that assembles itself, as all that appears on ‘first frame only’ browsers is a disassembled logo. To ensure that an animated GIF looks good on all browsers, make the first and last frames presentable.

Use Client Pull

Client pull works with Netscape 1.1 and above, as well as most other browsers, but not with Lynx. It enables you to specify, using HTML, that the user's Web browser should automatically load another Web page after a specified delay. To do this, you need to put a special HTML tag in the <HEAD> section of your document, preferably as the first tag in that section.
The tag looks like this: <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content--"4;URL=http://~.yourwebsite/nextdoc.htnil">

This tag instructs the Web browser to wait four seconds and then load http://www.yourwebsite/nextdoe.htinl, which could in turn contain another <META> tag instructing the browser to load another document. Using this technique you could put together an infinite loop, that is, one document that leads to another that leads back to the first. Replace the ‘4’ in the above <META> tag with the desired delay, and replace Shocked sites with the URL of the next document. Note that this must be an absolute (full) URL, that is, you need to specify the full machine name and location.

Remember to make your delay long enough so that the viewer can read the document. It's usually best to let the viewer know that the next page will be loaded automatically so that s/he is not surprised. Also, put a link to the next document at the bottom, top or both, not all browsers support client pull.

If you create an infinite loop, then provide a link out-going to another document is the only way for the user to stop the loop. For more details on client pull, read Netscape's information on dynamic documents.

Don't be Shocked

Faster than video or not, Shocked files are still big files. On busy sites in particular, viewers will spend a lot of time staring at the ‘Made with Macromedia’ logo while waiting for your file to download. This can be tiresome when encountered on site after site. In addition, while browsers cache text and images, they don’t as yet cache Shocked presentations. So when viewers return to a page they've seen and downloaded before, they’re confronted once again with the Macromedia logo and must wait while the file downloads a second time.

One site we looked at managed to avoid these problems to a certain extent: on first entering the Shockwave version of the site, you see a spinning Shockwave cube that doubles as an image map. Yet when you return to the home page, you aren't met with a blank Macromedia logo, nor must you wait for the Shocked cube to download again. So, how does it work. The trick is to send you to a different ‘home’ page, with the same text and graphics as the ‘home’ page you visited first. Because the graphics are already cached on your hard drive, the page assembles instantly, just as if you had actually been there before. And since the link you have followed is labelled ‘home’, the sleight of hand works well, and it's all the more impressive for calling no attention to itself.

Management

Management strategies for site management in an organisation with multiple Webmasters.

There are two possible schemes, Owner Administered Sites (OAS), and a commercial product like Vignette's StoryServer. OAS usually have a team that manages a server containing the main navigational pages. These include pages of interest to the entire corporation, such as organisation charts, and ‘quick-hit’ documents which are not complex enough to warrant a site of their own.

Then there’s normally a server devoted to OAS. Any department wishing to maintain its own information is given an account on this server and provided with general guidelines on format and appropriate content. It's then left to its own devices (with help from the team as necessary). The local administrator manages and publishes content to its site, and the overall navigation scheme links into the information. The multipule admin setup is transparent to the user, but each administrator is free to manage his/her own content. StoryServer, by Vignette (www.vignette.com), is a comprehensive site management and publishing tool, which makes it easy for many authors to create and publish content to a central source. Look at Vignette's site for more details.

MORE INFORMATION
If having read this guide you would like to discuss how we may be able to help you, please call us on (01373) 454576 and speak to Peter Beech-Allen, or E-mail a request to us for further information.