Presentation and Production

Name Your Site

Your domain name is often used for ranking your Web site in Internet directories and search engine listings. Pick a name wisely. If your business name indicates what you and the first word of it begins with "A", you have a distinct advantage in securing top visibility with these information search tools. Remember, too, that when hunting for content on the web, people tend to search by key words or specific names. While the InterNIC allows domain names up to 26 characters long (including the top-level domain name, i.e., .com, .org, .net, .edu, etc.), work to keep yours short and memorable. Consider how your domain name will look when an email address is added to it. If at all possible, keep the total number of characters to the right of the @ sign (your domain name and the top-level domain, i.e. westward.com) in an email address below 12. Make sure the choices you select for both the domain name and your email addresses will look appealing and fit nicely on your calling cards and other promotional materials. Sound out the domain names you are considering. The one you select must be easy for a broadcaster to repeat on air or someone to say over the phone so the listening audience can clearly hear and understand your message.

Before 1999 has ended there will be at least three new top level domains and maybe more. While some businesses may find it necessary to register names under these new domains to protect their trademarks, resist using a new one in lieu of a .com address unless you have a substantial marketing budget. It will take a lot longer to make addresses ending in those new domains memorable. If you are hoping to attract the burgeoning Internet television consumer audience, bear in mind that the Internet television device manufacturers have programmed the browser to default searches on .com followed by .net domains. This means if a person subscribing to WebTV®, searched on the word company, the WebTV® browser would automatically search for company.com. If no active domain could be found, then it would search for company.net. Industry veterans such as myself predict it will take past the Year 2000 for any new top level domains to become more popular than the .com extension.

Brand Your Presence

Your identity must be easy to recognize and memorable, regardless of the size of your business. To brand your identity with your Web site, make sure each of your HTML document headers, footers, and graphics bear a consistent theme. For example, aim at using the same accent colors and image sizes (by type) on all pages.

If you use the same theme in your online presentations as you do with your offline marketing collaterals, you will find it easier to be remembered. Repetition is critical for invoking strong memory recall.

Inform and Entertain

People do business with people. Visitors to your online locations should be focused on as people, even more personally than when you would meet them face to face. Why? One of the most appealing features of communicating and transacting business in the online world is that it can be done in the most private areas and times at the convenience of the communicator from anywhere there is at least standard phone line and proper communications equipment.

Successful webs not only inform but also entertain their readers. They must make the reader feel comfortable in taking the first steps toward contacting you. Successful webs must include content that will help people in making better purchasing or lifestyle decisions and give them a reason for returning to visit often. (In the electronic communications industry providing content in such a way is more commonly known as infotainment). Online visitors should be able to pick up on the personalities of your people when they come to your web. This can be accomplished through photographs and illustrations in addition to carefully crafted words.

Encourage Interaction

A static web is one containing information that rarely changes. Often when companies first launch on the Internet, they publish content taken from existing print brochures. The only aspect of their web that may be interactive is their hyperlinked e-mail address. These instances seem to come up most often when a business is concerned about being first in its industry or geographic area to establish a web. While some Internet wizards look down on this type of content, it works. Depending on the nature of your business and your target online market, it may work well best as a short-term solution. If you find yourself in this position, move quickly to create more interactive opportunities within your first three months after launching your Web site. New visitors will continue to come to your web if you have it properly indexed with the various databases used for searching addresses on the Net but return visits will quickly dwindle if your web does not encourage some type of interaction.

The best web publications provide opportunities for visitors to interact with you or fellow visitors. Some of the more general features to include on your web to create interaction are:

• Hypertext e-mail links (e-mail window will appear for visitors to write directly to the addressee from the web)
• Guest books for visitors to sign (goal should be to eventually offer an incentive for visitors to register, such as entry in a drawing)
• Surveys that publish results to the web upon entry completion (Visitors are more likely to participate if they can see the results of their efforts right away.)
• Forms to complete (forms that make visitor want to think and respond, with an incentive for participation) that will elicit a fast response. These forms can be downloadable or served for completion on the web. If it is necessary to use longer forms, you should choose the downloadable option as it is quite normal for long forms to time-out in server side processing and for the person completing the form to become impatient and skip completing the form all together.
• Web discussion forums (similar to those available on the major commercial online services and electronic bulletin board services)

If your business produces a print catalog or sells products, a more sophisticated but costly approach to creating interaction is to publish a catalog as part of your web and give people options to order online from that catalog. The catalog should provide ways for visitors to look up specific information from its contents, based on their interests and past buying decisions. The best catalog webs (also most expensive) provide up-to-the minute information on pricing and product availability.

Make Information Access and Storage
Fast, Easy and Transportable

In some respects you can compare building your web to writing a book or telling a story. Depending on the nature of your business, you could also compare the first stage of building it to developing a printed brochure. It should tell its readers who your business is, what it does, what products and/or services are offered and how the reader will benefit. Your web, like your print brochure, should conclude with a call to action.

The first page of your site serves as the door to your home on the Web. Just as they do in coming to your office or home, visitors should feel comfortable and welcome when they open your web door. The first page is typically called the home page and labeled index.htm or index.html. Readers should be able to find their way to all other first level pages (chapters) from the index page. The total levels of information accessible to the public should never be deeper than three. The rule of thumb in structuring levels is to make sure the visitor can get the information and view it from their web browser with all the graphics visible within two minutes from the slowest acceptable Internet connection speed. Each page of your site should take no longer than 60 seconds to load at the 14.4 modem baud rate. A modem connected at 14.4 baud usually loads 1 KB (or 1000 bytes) per second, thus text and graphics for one page should be no more than 60 KB combined. (A typical page without graphics or hypertext coded tables is 1000 bytes).

If you anticipate a hypertext document will be retrieved from the web, printed on paper and shared with others, be sure to print it out on paper before launching it on the web. Avoid including so much content in one HTML file that the printed document will not fit on one standard letter size sheet of paper. People often forget to wait for a second sheet to print out and other times, printers fail to print out more than one or two sheets of a file due to computer and printer random-access memory (RAM) limitations. We also recommend including URL addresses on each page as visitors may not have their browsers set up properly or their printer may fail to print the URL as a header or footer due to its RAM limitations.

Focus on Compelling Content

When determining what content to include, step into your customer’s frame of mind. What does that customer ask about your business, its services or products most often? If you can answer who you are, why you are in business, what you do, what services or products you offer, define the value of those services or products to your customers, and why people should do business with you, you will be well on your way to developing the right content for your first home page.

You should be able to gather the information you need to present on your web from existing promotional materials, customers and co-workers. However, should you find you need more or different information to attract your target audience to your Web site, you should know that there are several resources on the World Wide Web that will allow you to republish their content, either for free or for a small fee.

Regardless of which resources you use, you will need to review the content for web publication and in most cases, do some editing or rewriting to address your target audience. Why? First, you should consider that due to the nature of delivery medium itself, a computer screen, reading takes 25 percent longer. Second, industry statistics indicate that web visitors generally do not read a web publication like they would read a print publication. Instead, they tend to scan the pages for content relative to the subject of their search. Most often, if they sense any marketing hype or sales gimmicks they will skip over the content or leave the site. To gain more insight on how web visitors digest the information you print on your web, please review the white paper, Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web, available online at http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/writing.html, published in 1997, and Applying Writing Guidelines to Web Pages, at http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/rewriting.html, published in 1998. These white papers were written by John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen, writers of the Sun Microsystems web pages, as a result of exhaustive studies of their web visitors. I also recommend reading the book, Web Style Guide : Basic Design Principles for Creating Web sites, by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton. Published in March 1999, this book is the evolution of content originally published on the web in 1997 by the authors at http://www.info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/. It contains over 160 pages of valuable instruction on preparing your copy for web publication.

Prepare Your Content for Web Publication

Once you have gathered the information, you can prepare it for web publication in two ways. If you want to keep costs down, you should write the first draft of copy using your favorite word-processing program and ask your online consultant for assistance in editing and HTML coding (web authoring). Or, you could take the information you have gathered and ask your consultant to write the copy, convert it to HTML for you and launch it on the World Wide Web.

Choose Effective Page Titles

One of the most important points to remember in constructing a Web site is that every HTML document must have a TITLE. According to Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, every title should be no more than 64 characters long. If this step is neglected, you not only make it difficult for your regular visitors to find information but also the average netizen searching the Web for specific content through popular search engines and Internet directories. If you have selected one of our packages, you will note that a basic relative title is automatically generated for each page. You may change the content of any title but, for other than the home page, we caution to keep it short (i.e. one to three words) enough to fit on the graphic navigational buttons designed for your site. If you choose to be more descriptive, insert a second "tag line" instead.

Add a Tag Line to Each Web Page

This is your opportunity to add an important descriptive summary of the content viewers will find on a particular page. While you can provide this information in the first line of the first paragraph of your content, often times more attention is aroused by highlighting it as a separate heading, immediately following the title of your page.

Provide Text in Easy-to-Use Formats

To save yourself some time and money, we recommend that you use the latest version of Microsoft Word for your web copy writing. If you do, you will have the option to include hyperlinks in your documents and you can be sure that what you want bolded or italicized will appear the same to your web publication. You will also be able to save your document in HTML format. This will translate to less work for your web developer and thus, lower cost for you. If you don't use MS Word, you can still save some time for everyone involved by saving your document in a rich text format (.rtf file extension).

Bear in mind that any fonts you use in your documents must also be resident on the computer of the visitor who is browsing your web publication. Certain fonts are also more legible through web browsers than others. The fonts most common are: Times Roman, Arial, and fixed (Courier typewriter style). Microsoft has introduced several new fonts designed specifically for the web and made them freely available for computer users to download. To save yourself some time, check now to see if any of these fonts are already installed on your computer system. The font names are as follows:

• Andale Mono (formerly monotype.com)
• Webdings
• Trebuchet MS (bold, italic, bold italic and normal)
• Georgia (bold, italic, bold italic and normal)
• Verdana (bold, italic, bold italic and normal)
• Comic Sans MS (bold and normal)
• Arial® Black
• Impact™
• Arial® (bold, italic, bold italic and normal)
• Times New Roman (bold, italic, bold italic and normal)
• Courier™ (bold, italic, bold italic and normal)

The most popular of those font families are Verdana and Georgia. You can download these fonts from the Microsoft Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/. Microsoft has also created a web embedding fonts tool (WEFT) to assist you in including other fonts in your web publication for viewing by those who do not have the fonts installed on their systems. You can learn about and get WEFT by going to http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft/.

For further information regarding issues that may crop up when selecting type for web publications, read Microsoft's Typography on the Web at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/default.htm.

Use Graphics Consistently and Sparingly

Including photos or illustrations on your web pages can attract or discourage visitors, depending not only on the subject matter but the size and format of the graphic. While graphics are used in traditional communication media primarily to attract attention, when they appear in online venues, they should be used to impart information.

If you have existing graphic files you want to incorporate in your web pages, they need to be in .gif or .jpg format for viewing online. Photos should not be rendered in millions of colors but rather 256 colors to facilitate faster loading by web browsers and to accommodate users who view graphics from lower resolution monitors. Line drawings and clip art appear sharper in .gif format and photos in .jpg format for online viewing.

Keeping the sizes of your graphic images down, both in pixel count and kilobytes is essential not only to speed up browser page loading but also to printing the pages on paper. Be sure to test the time it takes to print your pages out offline as well as online.

Warn visitors when larger graphics are forthcoming on the page and if at all possible, prepare a smaller version (thumbnail) of the graphic to display on the page, giving visitors the option to view the larger one at their convenience.

Remember to use graphics only as a secondary communications tool. Not all visitors to your web pages will be able or have the time to view your graphic images. Test your pages to be sure there is enough written content to grab their attention and if necessary, encourage these visitors to view an alternative all-text page of the entire content expressed in your graphic representation.

Keep Information Fresh — Update Your Web Often

To keep track of the vast number of home pages on the World Wide Web, programmers have developed software programs that conduct automated searches and updates of page locations and contents. You should check your web pages for expired hyperlinks and other stale information at least twice a month. Even if you are only opening an existing file and resaving it, taking these steps will insure your home page stays in the databases of the more popular Internet search engines.

While most browsers on the market since April 1995 have a way of indicating the latest archive date of the web page being viewed, it is advisable to enter the date of the latest revision on the home page, itself. It is better to hide your revision dates within the HTML code comments and publish the current date publicly on your web. This can be achieved easily with a small amount of JavaScript programming and one additional line of code in your HTML documents. Ask your web developer about this option.

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