Ideas for Your Web Page

Just as print publishing established much of the markup language for the coding of web pages, so the practices of print publishing still have something to teach us about authoring web pages.

"What has intuition to do with your website's home page?"

Newspapers have those "What's Inside" sections on the front page. The Wall Street Journal has a sidebar column with nothing but short titles and descriptions of articles that appear other than on the first page of this publication. The highly popular USA Today also has this. Books have both tables of contents and indices. The purpose of all of these is to help you find what you want to read - to find the information you need.

Your web site needs both a table of contents and an index. Now, take a moment to look on this page to the left column of drop-down menus. This is the table of contents for this site. Now look up above this column to the "Site Map" link. This is the index. Both of these tools help navigation, but both of these are not sufficient by themselves. In fact, both are constructed and occasionally refined on the basis of how "intuitive" they are.

Developing great web sites is an ongoing and iterative task. Web sites do not just happen with the first composition. Professional authors tell us that the best work comes after many re-writes. This is also true for web designers. John Cato, in his book User Centered Web Design (Addison-Wesley, 2001) , lifts up this goal:

"Perhaps the most easy-to-use products are those you don't notice (p. 1)." There is always a learning curve to using the site you author; however, our task as designer/authors is to make this as shallow a curve as possible. The bottom line is, users do not log-on to our sites to study long and hard about the structure of the site. As Cato writes, "A useable product [e.g. webpage] is one which is conceived and produced to be easy to learn, easy to use, and useful." He goes on, "This is easy to say, but harder to achieve" (p 5).

This is where intuition comes in. (Note that your intuition can be a help and a hindrance.) The web author needs to be aware of this and use this awareness in constructing the pages (especially the first page ("home" page), assembling the table of contents, and making the index. The questions to ask are:

Always have in mind what our English Composition teachers attempted to drill into us: "Writers, you are writing for others who do not know what you know. If you put yourself in the place of your readers, would you understand what you are writing?" Give clues directly (one word description of the link) and through the context of your titles, articles, and phrases.

Here are some examples. If you link (with no other clue) the name of an individual mentioned in your story to another page, what will that page contain? Will the next page be what the user would assume it to be?

The list could go on an on, as to what a "bare" link would yield. Each person would think of one or more of these possibilites or more. You can't cover all these bases. Not even a web team can do so. Nor should you. You need to stick to the purpose and goals of your site, but at the same time provide an experience of dialogue between you (represented by your page(s)) and the one who views your page(s).