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What are the essential traits of great Web sites? After you visit a site and find yourself staying awhile, what makes you stay? A sense of humor helps. Flashy graphics are nice. But the fundamental traits that make a site work are more elusive. This article will break down the essential characteristics of great Web sites into some easily followed rules of thumb.
Most of these guidelines are just plain common sense, which seems to be a scarce commodity on the Web. The sexy proprietary page-layout and text markup features provided by Netscape and Explorer as they leapfrog each other have seduced many a webmaster into jazzing up their pages, only to be forced to put "you must use Netscape/Explorer to view these pages" at the bottom. This could be rephrased to say "these pages look awful without Netscape or Explorer." Stick with standard HTML (currently HTML 4) (1) and your pages will look good on all browsers that support it.
Overall, we've found that companies either get the Web or they don't. Your Web site should reflect the culture of the Web, which we call the "Gift Economy." (Witness Netscape and Microsoft.) Very few sites (5%) can charge for admission or require membership, and many people avoid sites with these barriers. Give away something valuable: information, software, advice, humor, and people will flock to your site.
Original content is the most important trait of a great Web site. |
Here are the Web site guidelines that we follow at internet.com.
Customize and target your content/site to your users. Think "one-to-one" Web sites. |
A good example of a one-to-one Web site is c|net. c|net started with two in-house proprietary content delivery systems: Prism and Dream (2). Prism, or Presentation of Real-time Interactive Service Material, was the site management and page generation engine behind the pages of c|net. CNET has since developed a more sophisticated page-delivery system, Story Server, which powers CNET and the newer spinoff sites of shareware.com, search.com, and news.com. Story Server, marketed by Vignette, is a database-driven, template-based Web site publishing system, which we (internet.com) are transitioning to for our sites (internetnews.com is the first site to be converted to Story Server).
Template-based database publishing systems are much more efficient and consistent for publishers, give users a richer more targeted experience, and when coupled with ad software, give advertisers higher clickthroughs. Story Server stores content and graphic elements in a Sybase database, and as visitors request a page the content is "poured" on the fly into design templates.
Dream, or Delivery of Real-time Enhanced Messages, is the advertising content delivery system c|net started using in December 1995. Dream dynamically creates ad pages based on individual visitor characteristics, including hardware platform, browser type, host service, and domain. c|net's 1,000,000+ registered users receive even more specialized attention, their age, salary, and other demographics are utilized when delivering ads. CNET is now using Accipiter to deliver their ads, which has excellent targeting features. Many of the larger Web sites on the Web are using these specialized Web publishing systems, like Vignette and Autonomy.
Break up your tables vertically for a cascading load to appear more responsive (we use this technique on our front page). One huge table takes much longer to display content than stacked smaller tables which display one at a time. Microsoft's IE5 has a FIXED table width feature that speeds table display, unfortunately this is proprietary and does not work on Netscape's browser.
Optimize graphic file size for Web display (a maximum of 20 KB per graphic). Utilize page display speedups such as the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes for images. Use JPEGs where possible and appropriate (continuous-toned images) and minimize the color palette of GIFs to optimize file size. Provide text alternatives to graphics for low-bandwidth users, the blind, and for speed. ALTernate text tags for images should be functional, not descriptive. If the graphic has no function, use ALT="" (i.e., <IMG SRC="pics/splash.jpg" ALT="">).
Optimize your HTML by removing excess spaces, comments, tags and commentary, especially on your home page, to minimize file size and download time. Products like Antimony Software's Mizer and VSE's HTML Turbo automate this process by removing excess characters and HTML to optimize your HTML and JavaScript. I manually tune our home page for minimize file size (typically 14-15K for the HTML page), but these products can help even file-size obsessed webmasters like myself. These products are drag and drop, and should be used as the last step before you upload your page (the files are harder to read after many of the returns are removed). After optimization your pages will appear to snap onto the screen.
The second most important trait a Web site should have is interactivity. |
Another advantage of interactivity is self-generating content. By allowing your visitors to interact with your site they actually create content for you. Script-driven user surveys and forums allow visitors to share information with others and can help shape your site to better serve their needs. Forum or chat software is a great way to do this. A great example of a user-driven site is Slashdot, a news site for nerds which posts short stories submitted by users, and allows users to easily append comments to each story.
Users equate poor organization with poor site design. |
Sun Microsystems found that users equate poor organization with poor site design in their extensive usability study of their home page. They also found that users don't want to scroll. However, the hits on Discovery Channel Online increased by 40% after they went from non-scrolling design to a scrolling design. It depends on your application. Designing pages so important content is "above the fold" is a good idea, though some sites take this maxim to an extreme and cram everything into a cramped mess. Where possible, size your pages important content to fit into the typical user's screen (465 pixels wide by 340 pixels high for a 15" monitor). Web pages should be at most two 8.5 x 11 pages in length. I've seen many examples of huge 100K+ one page sites.
Part of having a well-organized site is providing multiple ways of easy navigation (3). Supply both text and graphics for buttons. Users feel more comfortable if you maintain a consistent look and feel throughout your site.
Many sites on the Web are just lists that someone else has already done. |
Tracking
Part of Web marketing is gauging the effect your pages have on the public. Sophisticated site usage tools such as I/Count, SiteTrack, WebTrends, and Interse Market Focus allow site developers and their clients to easily see the popularity of different pages, stay duration, where they come from and where they go, and even the path they take through your site. Include a what's new area to give frequent visitors a way to see what has changed since their last visit.
Automation
Maintaining a large Web site can be a daunting experience. Use automation tools where possible for site maintenance. Use local spiders such as MOMspider and LinkBot to help check for old URLs. Where you choose to link will affect how fast your links will fail. The deeper into a site you link, the more likely it is to change. Don't move popular pages in your site unnecessarily, you'll break the links to your pages. If you do move them, provide a "this page has moved" page. Many orphaned links are a sign of webmaster neglect.
Searching
Let users search your site with search tools such as SWISH and Excite for Web Servers. Offer an overview of your site with a TOC or site map.
Security is often the last item addressed on even larger commercial sites. Allowing adventurous users to sniff around your files (especially your server configuration files) is not a good policy, but amazingly only 20% of current Web sites are secure.
A common misconception companies new to the Web have is that if they put up a page, people will visit it. In order to have a popular site, you've got to offer something to the user: information, interactivity, fun, freebies, something more than an 800 number.
Original content is important. Users may come to your site once, but to keep them coming back you've got to have fresh original content.
Sites that offer freebees get noticed. Free software, services, databases or electronic newsletters will attract users like a magnet. SGI has a FREE LUNCH area where you can download free software, computer games, graphics, and video.
The Web is an interactive, dynamic, and rapidly changing new communications medium that your Web site should reflect. Well-organized, edited, and timely original content set in an attractive, interactive, and consistent format are some traits of great Web sites.
By Andrew B. King
Comments are welcome
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Created: May, 1995
Revised: Aug. 3, 1999
URL: http://webreference.com/greatsite.html
