"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                 August 31, 1999

In this issue: "To a greater extent than traditional
marketers, the web marketer needs to be at least
aware of the barriers to accessing his or her message
that can be posed by the high-technology medium
itself."

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To a greater extent than traditional marketers, the web
marketer needs to be at least aware of the barriers to
accessing his or her message that can be posed by the
high-technology medium itself.

In traditional marketing, creating a good message and
getting people to look at your message are major issues, but
making it easy for them to do so is not usually a problem
with print or television media. The web marketer is dealing
with a young and highly technical medium in which all three
of these problems can be challenging.

After great effort and expense you own a fine web site with
great graphics, eloquent text, and an unbeatable
message. Let's assume you've also solved the problem of
getting people to come and visit it. Now you get to the hard
stuff - making it work well and keeping it working well.

It's not enough to have good content. A web site has to be
user-friendly at many different levels, from layout to
load-speed, and keeping it that way is as big a job as
getting it that way.  The problem is multi-faceted and
requires attention at every level.

The first of these is in getting the details of the pages
themselves right and making them easy to use. A staple
element of Web success, the launch-and-fix strategy is
dead. Web shoppers have been to Amazon.com, and according to
tech marketing expert Frank Catalano as reported on
www.zdnet.com, their expectations are higher as a
result. Mostly, they expect things to work the first
time. Working the first time is partly a matter of the
correctness of the code behind your site, and partly a
matter of well-designed user interfaces that are clear and
unambiguous.

There is no substitute for testing. First, try to make
everything break. Be hostile; refuse to enter required
fields, enter nonsense. If you can make it break, make your
webmaster fix it. Then have your friends try to use your
site. Neither you nor your webmaster can judge if it's clear
and easy to use, because you both know how it's supposed to
work. If you have some really computer-naive friends,
they're the ones to use. (The kind who think the mouse is a
foot-pedal and the CD-ROM carrier is a coffee-cup holder are
best.) If they get confused, find out why and fix it. Test
regularly. I had to repair a formerly good piece of code the
other day because the site it interfaced with had changed
their format so my code quit working.

The next level of concern is what webmasters call "site
topology" which just means the way the site's elements are
connected together. There are many possible
arrangements. Does every page link to every other one? Are
the links laid out in particular paths?  Is there a central
page with links radiating to all the others in a star
configuration? Most likely there is some hybrid
arrangement. What is best depends on the particular
situation. Are the links clearly labeled? Do they tell you
what you're going to find? The key element here is making it
easy for visitors with different objectives to get what they
want in a clear and simple manner.

The New York Times reports that while IBM has been trying to
position itself as an Internet leader, a somewhat troubling
reality emerged. The company wasn't minding its own
e-business.

On IBM's Web site, the most popular feature was the search
function, "because people couldn't figure out how to
navigate the site," said Carol Moore, IBM's vice president
for Internet operations. The second most popular feature was
the "help" button, because the search technology was so
ineffective.
(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/cyber/commerce/30commerce.html)

The first part of getting the topology right is
understanding the needs of your average visitors. What
objectives will they have? Then make a clear roadmap for
them to meet that objective. The second part is using your
naive friends again and having them try to find something.

The on-going part of the problem is that web sites
grow. There always seems to be something new that merits a
new page. Keeping the topology rational requires attention
if the site is not to grow randomly and become a haystack.

Some of those links go off-site. "Stale links" are one of
the webmaster's greatest headaches. Other web sites are
always moving or going down (often temporarily) and making
your links invalid. Nothing irritates a visitor more, and
nothing is more of a nuisance to keep up to date. Check your
external links regularly, check them often, and try to find
out if it's not working for a permanent or a temporary
reason. (You can get programs that run scheduled checks of
all your links and report bad ones. There are also services
that will do this for you.)

At the next level, making your site work well means making
it efficient for your visitor to access and traverse
rapidly. This means loading pages quickly, which means
dealing with the reality of current Internet delays.

Moving billions of bits of images and text across the Web
still works a bit like an old-fashioned bucket brigade. Web
pages are broken down into tiny packets of information and
then handed from one computer to the next until they finally
reach their destination. It is a robust system of moving
data, but one that can be very sluggish at times, in part
because of the slight delays at each handoff which are
aggravated at high traffic periods. Then, most users still
have slow analog-line modems that suck in data at a relative
crawl.

As the new millennium approaches, the long-awaited advent of
high-speed access to the Internet promises to change the way
millions of people go online. Digital subscriber lines,
cable modems, and other fast broadband services already
allow data, music and video images to zip over either cable
systems or juiced-up phone lines, doing away with the World
Wide Wait. This will unlock a lot of interesting stuff on
the Web, because once we have high-speed access, Web
designers will design larger and more complex applications.

In the meantime, we have to live with the never-ending
tension between sites that are beautiful to look at and do
amazing things, and sites that will load before the visitor
gets tired and leaves. Java is popular and lets you produce
stunning effects. I won't currently use it because it takes
too long to load. (Sometimes I just put them up and play
with them and sigh over what might be ...)

We can't get away from graphics, however. Even a simple text
banner requires graphics if it uses anything but a
plain-vanilla font. If our sites are not to be visually
dull, graphics are a must. The problem is that graphics are
huge bandwidth hogs; the principal contribution to
slow-loading sites. Graphics that move are the worst of
all. I once saw a site (put up by a graphic artist) that was
gorgeous - the entire home page was a single huge image -
but it was a half million bytes of data and you could grow
old and die waiting for it to load.

The answer is not simple. Part of it is to plan graphics
wisely to get the best look for the least image area. You
and your web designer need to work closely on this. It is
the principal reason that graphics you may have had designed
for other purposes such as printed brochures are frequently
not usable in web applications.

Other parts of the answer are more technical and you
probably need to rely on your webmaster for them unless you
have a digital graphics background. These include things
such as the choice of format (gif versus jpg) and the use of
compressors which will set higher levels of compression
(equivalent to loss of resolution) in areas of the image
which have less detail while compressing less in areas that
need detail preserved.

Once this is done, maintaining the loading speed of a page
is not hard; you just have to leave it alone. However, this
is not so easy to do. We accumulate little logos and awards,
icons of off-site links, and the like. Buttons multiply as
new links to our own new pages increase. All of these
inoffensive little graphics start to add up. Eventually we
need to rethink the graphics content of the page. I recently
chucked out a half-dozen little logos of membership in
various webmaster societies from our home page. Who really
needs them?

Finally, when you add new pages to your site, plan on
re-using graphics from existing pages to the greatest extent
possible. Once an image loads for one page it can be
displayed on another without being downloaded again. Besides
giving a site a cohesive appearance, using the same header
graphics on all the secondary pages can save your visitors a
lot of waiting between pages.

To sum up:
1. Make it work.
2. Make it obvious how it works.
3. Make it easy to find.
4. Make it obvious what it is.
5. Make it load fast.
6. Go to step 1.

Best,

Jamie

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Sidereal Designs, Inc. "Making The Web Simple."   http://siderealdesigns.com