Copyright 2002 by Richard Seltzer
Originally published by Wiley. The rights have reverted to the author
Please post your reactions/comments/suggestions at Blogging about Books
http://www.samizdat.com/blog/?cat=10
In this chapter, first we'll consider whether -- given all the work you are going to put into this -- you might want to start your real site with your own domain name and a Web hosting service where you are likely to want to stay with for the long run.
Then we'll provide suggestions regarding the kind of Web site you might want to build and how to generate content for it.
Then we'll step you through an exercise of creating a Web-style presentation or converting a PowerPoint presentation to Web-style, as an example of how to link a series of pages into a coherent whole. And we'll give detailed advice on how to make your site easy for visitors to find and easy for them to navigate once they get there.
Required assignments:
• Create a presentation in Web-style format, as practice in how to
assemble Web pages into a complete site.
• Build a small Web site.
But you might want the work that you are doing in this bootcamp to count as more than just an exercise. You might want to build a site that has a useful purpose, that you'll be motivated to keep adding to and improving -- for personal reasons, as a community service, or for business. If that is the case, now is the time to get your own domain name, and sign up for Web space that you pay for.
Once you have your own domain name, moving from one hosting service to another is relatively painless. All your links from one of your pages to another should work just as well in the new place, and visitors get to you by entering the same URLs or clicking on the same links.
But as long as you are using someone else's domain name, like members.nbci.com/jones5, all your links and all your traffic are tied to that name, and moving can be very time-consuming and can throw away much of the hard work you've done in building traffic.
You might also want to move to paid space with your own domain name
in order:
• to have a name people will remember and that you can be proud of,
• to avoid having someone else's ads served up with your pages, and
• to reduce the likelihood that your hosting service going out of business
or changiing its rules might undermine what you are trying to accomplish.
Fortunately, today, the prices for some professional Web hosting services are quite low. I use and am very pleased with Hispeed.com. They currently charge $19.95/month for a virtual domain account (one with my own domain name), with unlimited Web space and unlimited traffic. For another couple dollars a month, I can serve up audio and video files. (We'll talk about audio and video in Chapter Eleven). They also provide support 24 hours a day, seven days a week by way of a toll-free phone number. To check out other options, see TheList www.thelist.com, which has a massive list of Internet service providers and Web hosts, with their prices and terms.
When shopping for a service, you want the ability to create pages on your own, without templates and without databases. Beware of page creation "wizards". You want to be in control of what you create and how it looks both to individuals and to search engines. You also want to be able to transfer files to the Web server using FTP from your PC or Fetch from your Macintosh.
If you decide on a paid Web hosting service, before signing up, reserve your domain name.
More than half a dozen services now sell "new" domain names. The original service, Network Solutions www.networksolutions.com makes it easy for you to search to see if the name you want is available. Today they charge $35/year for a name that ends in .com They also sell "used" names -- ones that others have signed up for but are not now using. And other services like Great Domains www.greatdomains.com specialize in acting as a go-between connecting sellers and buyers of domain names. During the dot-com boom, many people bought names with no intention of ever using them, in hopes of reselling at a vastly inflated prices. Hence, it was getting very difficult to find any pronounceable and memorable set of letters and/or numbers that wasn't already taken. Now many of those names have been abandoned and are available again, or are up for sale at bargain prices. In addition, new suffixes have been added, beyond the basic .com, .org., .net, .gov, and .edu. The new ones include .tv, .cc., and .ws, with still more to come. Try names that you could be proud of and that visitors are likely to remember and to associate with the kind of site you are trying to build. Longer names are more likely to be available than short ones.
Once you have "bought" the domain name you want, contact the Web hosting
service you have chosen, and ask them to step you through the process of
signing up for their service and providing the domain name company with
the technical information they need to activate your domain name for you.
Now, what am I going to write about?
You have Web space, and you know how to create Web pages. That's like having chalk and a blackboard, a stack of paper and a pen, wood and nails and empty space to build something on. What are you going to do with this opportunity?
You could build a site devoted to your family, your hobby, your club, a business you've always wanted to build, a family-member's team, a family-member's business, a community or non-profit organization, etc. What matters is that you create a set of pages, each of which does a necessary job, and all of which work together to produce results. To do so with the dedication and persistence necessary to really learn fundamental Internet business skills, you to believe in and care about the content and goal of your site. You need to be able to get personal satisfaction from what you do and positive feedback from people you respect. You can't expect to maintain the necessary level of involvement, to make time for this activity again and again, just because you think you should. It has to be self-reinforcing; it has to become second nature, so you don't consider it work. Working on your Web site should be like breathing and eating to you. It has to become part of who you are you and who you are proud to be.
Also, try to pick a topic that others will want to help you generate content for. If you try to do everything yourself, no matter how motivated you are, sooner or later you'll simply burn out.
For example? I have a separate number of areas within my Web site, any one of which could grow into a site of its own.
Are you involved with a local service organization or a charity? Might your church or your daughter's Little League team need a Web site?
Does your town or local community have a Web site? If not, you might consider teaming up with several neighbors to build one. You could each sign up for your own free Web space, each manage your space separately -- with responsibility for a clearly defined beat. You agree on a common look and feel for your pages and link back and forth to one another. You each encourage volunteers to help you gather and update useful information. With dedication, creativity, and team work, you could make a free site that rivals in usefulness sites that cost millions of dollars a year to operate.
I also posted a list of the books that Tim has read, as an incentive for him to read more. And now he has begun to write and post his own pages -- including suggestions for videogames to be based on quidditch (from the Harry Potter books) and on the cartoon TV series Gundam Wing.
Do you have a family member or a friend who has strong interests and a willingness to provide you with a steady flow of fresh content -- perhaps reactions to books or movies or music, along with frequently updated lists of favorites?
An old friend, Claude Thau, decided to start his own business as a consultant about long-term care insurance. So I posted his marketing documents and related articles of his at my site, as a way for him to reach new prospects. See www.samizdat.com/thau
Do you have friends or relatives with small businesses or hobbies that could benefit from pages on the Web?
My son Mike (the same one who was born with cleft-lip/cleft-palate),
is a student at Northeastern and a novelist. He is now writing his third
novel. I've posted samples of his writing at my Web site to help him build
an audience and get feedback. See www.samizdat.com/window1.html I'd like
to post more, but he still hopes for immediate success from the traditional
publishing establishment and is reluctant to give anything of his away
for free.
I
've also posted:
• a complete novel by Roberta Kalechofsky, "Orestes in Progress". See
www.samizdat.com/micah/orestes.html
• a book of poetry and photos by Diane Croft, now being revised and
soon to be posted again at www.samizdat.com/croft.html
• a story, a novel excerpt, and photos of paintings by Rex Sexton.
See www.samizdat.com/sexton
• stories by novelist Zak Mucha. See www.samizdat.com/mucha
• a book of literary criticism about Gogol by Laszlo Tikos, a former
professor of mine. See www.samizdat.com/gogol.html
• moves of all the tournament chess games of my chess champion son,
Bob Seltzer. See www.samizdat.com/chess.html
I also helped Jeremy Josephs, a freelance writer in France, add hundreds of his own articles to his own Web site, as a way to attract more traffic and, hopefully, generate more writing assignments. See www.jeremyjosephs.com/sitemap.html [no longer online]
Do you have a friend of relative who is an author? Published authors often have older material for which the rights have reverted to them, and also may have boxes full of interesting material that has never been published. You could either post their material at your site, or help them build their existing site, using their site to experiment with the principles in this book.
You might assemble lists of movies seen, music enjoyed, baseball cards collected, books read -- anything that might be of interest to your target audience. If your site is related to an organization, start with a list of members. If a school, lists of students, faculty, alumni/alumnae, and benefactors. If a team, the team members and the league and standings and practice times and personal stats. (For a good example of a volunteer site devoted to a hockey team check The Acton Boxboro Youth Hockey Association at www.abyha.org, built by Fred Isbell.) Whenever relevant, add links and email addresses to items in these lists.
Build lists of related and favorite Web sites, using search engines, like Google and AltaVista, to locate them.
Then begin to annotate your lists with your own comments and comments emailed to you by those who have seen your pages. If you enjoy writing or if someone collaborating with you in this project enjoys writing, then expand these notes to full-fledged reviews and/or diary-like accounts of your experiences.
If you have young children who are an important part of your life, consider including a personal narrative of your experiences as a parent, with related photos. See www.sitecoach.com/mcdonald for Alex McDonald's account of dealing with triplet boys at the "terrible twos" stage.
Depending on your topic and audience, you might want to include notes
on:
• celebrities
• videogames
• television shows
• movies
• sport teams
• recipes and restaurants.
Consider including:
• family and genealogical notes, with autobiographical contributions
from family members
• religious revelations and inspirational thoughts
• tributes to and memories of friends and relatives.
Don't hold back. Post anything and everything that's of interest to you and might be of interest to your target audience. Invite people to send you feedback and suggestions. When they do email you, email back immediately, and request permission to post the best of these messages at your site. If they say yes, don't procrastinate -- post the new content immediately (acknowledging the source), at the end of the documents that they are reacting to. For an example of how this kind of dialogue can snowball, giving you lots of good new content, check my article "Why Bother to Save Halloween?" at www.samizdat.com/halloween.html, which has generated dozens of interesting replies, and draws thousands of people to my site each year.
If you have children in school, consider posting their best school work on your Web site as a way of showing that you are proud of them.
If volunteers are helping you with your Web site or are helping an organization that you are supporting with your Web site, post profiles and photos of these people.
Many people are motivated more by their need for recognition than by
money. Use your site liberally to provide the kind of recognition that
your helpers and your loyal audience appreciate. Highlight the best emails
received -- use your Web pages to reward any activity that you want to
encourage more of.
There are exceptions when someone pays you to write something or when you do the writing as part of your regular job. Then your writing could be considered "work for hire", and the person paying you owns it. If you have any doubts, check your company's personnel policies or the contract under which you did the work. If you still have doubts, consult a lawyer. But in most instances, the ownership should be clear.
Registering your work with the U.S. Copyright Office establishes proof that by such-and-such a date you had created such-and-such work. That proof can help you win penalities from people who use your material without permission. For details about copyright and to get registration forms, check the Library of Congress site at http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright
When you write a message -- whether a paper letter or an email -- you own the words in that message. No one else has the right to do anything else with it than read it, without your explicit permission. That's why you should ask for permission before posting email messages from others on your site.
But when people communicate with one another, they do so in a context that includes certain expectations. When you send an email message, you know that the recipient might choose to print that message for convenience, and might also forward it to others. That's common practice. But to take that message and reproduce it in another medium (e.g., printing it in a book or putting it on a Web page) is, at best, questionable. It's not so much a question of the author expecting compensation, as the fact that the author might deem the message is changed by the new context. He might not want his message used as an example of bad grammar in a textbook, or subjected to ridicule on a Web site run by people with an opposing viewpoint. Or maybe the message was personal, meant only for the eyes of the recipient, or was written rashly and in haste, and the author now regrets having written it at all. In any case, the author should be the person judging what use is appropriate or inappropriate.
Likewise, if someone posts a message in a forum or message board on the Web, by so doing that person is saying that it is okay for that message to be available for the public to read from that site, with its unique context. But if you wanted to publish such postings in a different medium -- such as, including them in a printed book -- you would need to ask each and every author for permission to do so. Even though the material sits on your site, the rights to that content still belong to the people who wrote it.
These same rules apply to the physical world. If someone sends you a paper letter, you own the paper and have the right to read it. But the content of the letter still belongs to the person who wrote it. You do not have the right to publish as a book a collection of letters sent to you, unless you get the permission of the authors. Likewise, you don't have the right to post on the Web the contents of paper letters sent to you.
On the other hand, copyright only applies to the expression of ideas, not to the ideas themselves. To react to someone's ideas (whether spoken or published), you often need to restate them. And you have the right to uniquely express a thought that originated with someone else. In that case, as a matter of courtesy, as well as intellectual integrity, you should credit the person who, to the best of your knowledge, first came up with the idea.
Also, when people send you email and give you permission to post those messages at your site, you should be careful about editing those messages. Yes, you are acting in a way similar to a newspaper that publishes "letters to the editor", and it is common to correct spelling and grammatical mistakes and to include just excerpts, rather than the full message. But as a matter of courtesy and policy, you should be careful when judging what part of a message was intended to be personal and what part is appropriate to make public. You shouldn't edit items in such a way as to distort their meaning. And you shouldn't put such messages into an unnatural context that distorts their meaning. The people who send you email and give you permission to post those messages are your natural friends and allies -- they can help build traffic to your site and bring customers to your business. Avoid offending them.
How can you get the experience you need right away?
Start with a presentation that you've already written or write one explaining the purpose of the new Web site you plan to build. Your new presentation will consist of a series of short text HTML pages, linked together in series, and with links to examples on the Web. Building your presentation this way will give you a feel for how you can build your Web site and may generate new ideas on how you might want to use your site. You also might want to use this technique for presentations you do for work.
We're all tired of seeing the same old PowerPoint clipart again and again. We're tired of presentations that proceed linearly -- starting at slide number one and going through slide after slide to the last one. We're annoyed by presentations that take up many megabytes of disk space, that are so big they clog and crash email inboxes, and that are too big to fit on a diskette, so you have to carry your laptop to the meeting.
If the presentation already exists as a PowerPoint file, extract the text and only the text.
In this case, because you are going to be showing the sequence of Web pages to a live audience just as you might show PowerPoint slides, you want the full text of each page to be visible on a single screen, without having to scroll down, rather than making large pages (as I recommend repeatedly elsewhere).
Therefore, you should organize your text so each "slide" (Web page) consists of a headline and 3-6 bulleted items.
Use the same headline style for the headlines on every page. (I use Headline 1). And use a smaller, but easy to read headline style for the bulleted items. (I use Headline 3 for that).
Each page include brief text that explains the context -- so someone starting at this slide would know what it is part of.
You also should give each page its own unique HTML title (which will come in handy if and when you submit this presentation to search engines).
Keep your text short and crisp -- one line for each item, if possible. Separate each line with carriage returns. (Since you are using headlines, bullets won't work -- those styles are normally incompatible in Word).
Use horizontal lines to separate the headlines from the main text.
If you have informative illustrations (not just clip art), link from the related text to the image file. Then, when delivering the presentation, you can click on that link if you decide to show the picture.
At the bottom of each page, have links for "Next" and "Previous, and also a link to your title page, which should list major sections of the presentation, with links to the first page of each. That way, based on audience reaction, you can change directions -- go straight to a side sequence, or skip ahead quickly. Make all the links by providing just the file name (relative addressing), to make your presentation portable (so you can put it on a diskette or load it onto someone else's computer and the links among your pages will all work). Name all the files with .htm as the file extension, to be compatible with older software. If you might at times want to go into greater detail on one or more points, depending on audience reaction, then make a link from the related text to a separate sequence of pages, and from the last one, link back to that starting point.
If you are going to have a live Internet connection when you make the presentation, then link directly from your text to examples on the Web. If you know you will not have a live connection, then do screen captures of the example pages, using a program like PaintShop Pro, save those images on your hard disk, and link to those image files.
Set up your last page as a list of related resources for follow up, including your contact information.
Save all the slides and images for a given presentation alone in the same directory. You should be able to view your presentation, with all the links among the slides working, in both Word and from your browser.
Presentations done in this style take up very little space. An ordinary diskette could hold a presentation that lasts five hours or more. You can deliver the presentation using a browser, from a hard drive, from a diskette, or from a Web site. You don't need to worry about whether the machine at the meeting site has the same version of PowerPoint that you do, or even uses the same version of Windows that you do. If your files are available at a Web site, you can use any computer (Mac, UNIX workstation, Linux PC, or Windows PC) for delivery; and your audience can easily review your slides or show them to others later, at their own convenience.
You can also point colleagues to the URL of the first slide, and they could go through it when they please, without having to use email or download anything. You could even have a concall with everybody connecting to the same Web-based presentation and clicking through it together, even though you are thousands of miles apart.
Such presentations can have many optional branching paths, and alternate examples, giving you the opportunity to digress and ad lib, with style, even following links on Web pages that you selected as examples.
By doing this exercise, you can learn a new way of creating business presentations in general. At the same time, you get experience and insight into how to create simple Web pages and link them together in a Web site.
As an example of a presentation of this kind, check a speech/tutorial
about search engines that I recently created at, starting at www.samizdat.com/vaughn/title.htm
Make navigation easy for people and for robots
Keep in mind that you created that presentation not just for you to deliver it face-to-face, but also for posting on the Web, where visitors could check out pieces at their convenience and in the order that met their personal interests.
In putting it together, you followed design instructions by rote. You put links on every page of your presentation -- not just links to the "Next" slide, but also links to the title page, and from the title page to the start of each major section.
You also included a clear explanation of the context on each and every page, so someone looking at any slide would know what the presentation was about.
The slides themselves had the simplest possible design, consisting of text, with no decoration and no special effects.
You gave each page an HTML title.
Now let's take a look at the principles behind these instructions.
Pages at some sites resembled the old Burma Shave ads on highways -- each page providing a small piece of a message that made little or no sense out of sequence. Other sites were more like branching adventure stories -- providing one element of the story, then a couple of choices, then a little more information and a couple more choices. Visitors proceeded through a maze of hallways, opening one door after another.
Search engines wrecked that model.
Thanks to search engines, people now come to the specific page that has the content that matches their query, regardless of where that page happens to be at a Web site. To search engines, all pages are equal. There is nothing special about a home page. People now come in through the back door, the basement, and the windows. In other words, search engines changed the basic principles by which you should design your Web site.
Every page is a potential entry point for visitors. So every page should be able to stand on its own, clearly stating its context and purpose and providing helpful navigation buttons (hyperlinks that take the visitor to other key pages at your site.)
Clicking is not a pleasurable activity; it's a means to an end. And navigating through a Web site shouldn't be like finding your way through a maze. Keep it simple.
Also, don't put the bulk of your effort into designing your home page when most of your visitors won't see it first, and some of them will never see it at all.
On the one hand, you can't afford to compete with sites like that on their own terms. On the other hand, you shouldn't want to, because you can do much better, providing real benefit to your visitors -- at much less cost.
The expensive and flashy techniques used by such sites (e.g., databases, frames, dynamic pages, and pages behind sign-in/registration forms) unintentionally block search engines, sacrificing all the traffic that might have come their way, at no cost, if all their content had been indexed.
The pages that web crawlers fetch also include links to other pages, and the crawlers follow that trail of links. Pages to which there are no links are never found. Pages that have many links to them are visited more often than pages with few links to them.
Hence the links among the pages at your site not only make it easy for visitors to navigate, they also provide a trail for search engine web crawlers to follow. If it takes very few clicks to go from any page at your site to any other, that makes it more likely that web crawlers, randomly following links, will find all your pages.
The most important text on a page is the HTML title
As noted before, search engines give high priority to the content in HTML titles. If words matching a query appear in the HTML title of a page, that page will usually go to the top of the list of matches, beating out pages where those words are anywhere else. If you neglect to give your pages HTML titles, or don't make those titles clear, unique, and meaningful, you are throwing away potential traffic.
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