Although you may not have completed the homework, by now you've at least thought about who is using your site, and what they're likely to want to see. You've thought a bit about what you have to offer, and what you want to say. And after you've completed the homework, you should have a good sense of the general structure of the site - what information you'll provide up front (on the home page), and additional areas of content and information. You may not have produced an exact map of your new site, but it should be a fairly straightforward process for you to map your user/question/answer structure onto an actual map of your website, indicating what pages will be available, and how they're related to each other. Typically, I find that circling groups of related questions is a good indicator of what the website pages will be.
It's now time to begin creating actual content for your website. Websites can contain all sorts of content - text, pictures, animations, movies, audio, and more. Anything other than text and images is beyond the scope of this course, but if you're the adventurous type, don't let that limitation stop you from experimenting. However, it's again critical to put yourself in the users' chair - what are they really going to want to see? I've found I can convey what is needed with a minimum of technology. Too frequently, I encounter sites that have all sorts of fancy stuff that just slows down my connection and interferes with my ability to get answers to the questions I've brought to the site in the first place. I'm a big fan of minimalism, and Jacob Nielsen (one of the web design gurus out there: http://www.useit.com/) is of much the same opinion: less is more. Note that as you explore how to build website, not only through me, but through on line resources and books, you'll find many differences of opinion and many conflicting recommendations. There are few hard and fast rules on the 'net, just good rules of thumb - take what makes sense to you and build on that.
Usually, a website is not an end unto itself, and the content on a site is often part of a larger media program. There may be corresponding marketing brochures, papers, books - all sorts of other media. It's important as you set out to create content that you distinguish between the content and the medium. For this reason, I recommend creating your textual content with a text editor, even something as simple as notepad (on Windows), simple text (on the mac), or vi (on linux).
One of the problems with moving content from one medium to another is how a particular medium handles formatting. You've probably seen more than one example of a web page that appears to have garbage on it (e.g. &#qoutehello&#quote instead of "quote"). HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a formatting language. It's one way to tell a piece of software how to format your text. Word processing software has to remember how to present your content to you, and does so through many invisible characters. As a simple test, create a document with Microsoft Word (something simple like "hello world"), save it, and open it with notepad. See all that gobbleygook surrounding your text? Those are the invisible characters Word uses to correctly present text and images to the user. Which specific invisible characters are used for a particular function are proprietary to the software - that's why you can only open a Word document with Microsoft Word.
HTML has two features that make it significantly different than word processing software: 1) it is an open standard; and 2) it has no invisible characters. An open standard is a standard that is open to the public. Microsoft does not publish what characters it uses to mean specific things - Word 5.0 might use !@#$75 to mean paragraph, and $%^001 might mean the same in Word 6.0. Only Microsoft knows, and has the right to change what its language is. HTML, by contrast, is readily available as a standard to anyone who wants to see it ( see http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/ for the current standard). This is how a variety of web browsers, including Netscape, Explorer and AOL are able to show you (generally) the same thing - each piece of software relies on the standard to determine how to handle page formatting. Of course, as you've seen by now on the web, not all browsers are standards-compliant, and thus one page can look different on different browsers and platforms. This is a limitation in the software development, not HTML.
When I say HTML has no invisible characters, I mean that if you look at an HTML page in a text editor, or "view page source" in your browser, you can see the entire formatting language in a (relatively) readable format - no #$%@#07 characters on the page. Specifically, HTML uses pairs of tags to identify how to handle chunks of content. For example, to make a word bold in HTML, you surround with the beginning and ending bold tags: word. The browser sees the tags, and then knows how to format a particular word, phrase, or entire page.
Most of the web page design programs out there hide much of this from you - you format your text, and the program inserts the appropriate HTML tags as necessary. This is called WYSIWYG editing (What You See Is What You Get). The reason I suggest using a plain old text editor is to remove as much formatting from the text as possible. It's important to separate content from the medium. The same text might appear in a brochure, on a web page, and in a magazine. Having a master copy of the text that's been edited, spell-checked, and proofed for grammar, semantics and typos greatly simplifies the job of an editor. Once that text is inserted in a particular medium, you need only check for formatting, and double-check things like quotes, dashes, etc. Without a master copy, you must ultimately edit each appearance of a body of text, which you know only too well is time-consuming and difficult.
As you begin to write your text for your website, keep in mind the medium itself. People don't "read" on the web as a rule - they browse. Content needs to be packaged in small, easily digestible chunks. Frequently, you'll see very large chunks of content encapsulated in a Word or PDF document - this makes them easy to download and print, for offline reading. As a rule of thumb, I try to limit page content from one to three "browsersfull" of information - no more than 300 words or so. If a particular page starts to vastly exceed this limit, consider breaking it into sequential or parallel pages of content. You may want to create separate files for each page, or put all your pages in one text document. The former is "better" in terms of content management; it's a good idea to have a one to one correspondence between content and web pages, but since you are probably the only one managing your website, this is probably unnecessary. If you are copying your content from another program such as Quark, etc., pay careful attention to special characters (anything that's not a number or in the alphabet). For instance, there are multiple different kinds of quote, and only the "straight quotes" ( " ' ) tend to work on a web page.
Also important is to remember that you can link. Pure text, such as this email, are inherently linear - you read from top to bottom. But the web is not like this - it's easy to leap from one place to another at a whim. This is the power of the web - embrace it. When you're writing your content, keep your whole site in mind. You might mention your resume in your introduction - this is a good place for a link. This is in part how you can break your content up into small chunks. Instead of including everything on a single page, group related thoughts onto a page, and link from one group of thoughts to another. I usually call out links in my text in some special way, for instance: you can see my resume [link: resume] elsewhere on the site. Ultimately, you'll use some web page design software to create the actual links.
From someone's homework: "This is tricky for normal marketing because of the range of my skills. I have multiple portfolios; they're cumbersome, and people tend to think of me in one cubbyhole or another (one person thinks of me as an editor of textile books and magazines; another thinks I am a crackerjack researcher who can fill in the blank in a piece she's writing; many think I am only a copy editor--but one who can simultaneously handle fifty or more authors, many not native-English-speaking, or can edit poetry without harming the text). "
There is an important point to be made hear, which I need to mention explicitly. Because the web is non-linear, neither does your site have to be. You are not limited to a single home page, or point of entry. You may very well want to point different users at different pages from the beginning.
As an example, I'll use me. I do a lot of different things, and seem to have accumulated a web site for each of them. All my web pages are linked together, somehow, under http://neil.verplank.org/ but I have multiple entry points:
/ - what I point my web clients to
classes - what I point my students to
/classes/build - the home page for this particular class
/writing - what I point potential publishers to
/furniture - what I point potential furniture customers to (I also design and build furniture)
It's possible to reach any one of these pages from any other page, through some number of clicks. But I have designed effectively different web sites and home pages for each point of entry. So as you think about users and content, be aware that you can easily have more than one "front page" or introduction. They all need to make sense someone, and you must think about just exactly how a user might go from one place to another, but you are not limited to a single "home" page.
Finally, I find it particularly helpful to think in terms of actual conversations with actual users. From there, I tend to think of pages as my half conversation. A great deal of what I have on the web is there to address questions *before* I get them - if anyone actually picks up the conversation and follows through, we don't usually have to start at zero.
****
I believe I've mentioned this, but you can find reading suggestions on my website here:
If you want to delve more deeply into websites, I recommend User Centered Web Design by John Cato, and Design Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jacob Nielsen. Both books will cover in great detail all the things you need to think about as you build your website.
So, homework for this week is create the textual content of your website, based on your user map from assignment #1. I don't need to see your content at this stage, unless you have specific design-related questions. So, create your content and hang onto it.
Next week - creating graphics and images for the web.