The traces of the smallest spider's web

Citation

Ellis, B. (1999), "The traces of the smallest spider's web", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 11 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.1999.21911bag.001

The traces of the smallest spider's web

Keyword Internet

The traces of the smallest spider's web[1]

Since I started to write these Internet commentaries for Soldering & Surface Mount Technology and its sister-journals, Circuit World and Microelectronics International, I have received a few comments from the companies whose sites I have mentioned. In one case, I was "flamed" for having been too harsh in my criticism, although I still feel it was justified. In a few other cases, the site owners admitted that my negative comments were justified and have since taken steps to improve the performance of their web site. At least, this shows that these commentaries serve a useful purpose. Three or four companies have even sent me a note of thanks, which is always welcome. On a couple of occasions, I have been asked what my criteria are for a good site and for a bad site. This is a very complex subject and I propose, for this commentary, to concentrate on the important questions of design and creation of web sites, rather than to comment on any specific ones. This is offered as a constructive service to the journal's readers. My next commentary will be back-to-normal.

If a company employs a professional web site designer, the person responsible may think that he has no say in how the site should perform. This is not true: he should establish a list of exactly what he requires on the site and how it should appear and perform. Many designers know less than the company webmaster about this, especially if they are publicity agents specialised in designing the image of a company onto paper documents. This is not the same thing as doing it onto a computer screen. However, because of the poor performance of some professionals (or schoolkids trying to earn some extra pocket money), more companies are designing their own web sites, especially small and medium enterprises. This has become easy with the aid of specialist software, such as Microsoft FrontPage but, even with the advanced "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" features of such software, there is a long learning curve which is worthwhile to explore fully. You will possibly be tempted to employ many of the "bells and whistles" offered by such software, but be aware that they often impose a heavy cost in performance. Make sure you know what you are doing before embarking on unknown territory. What I would most strongly advise against is using a word processor, such as Word or WordPerfect to design a web site, although it may occasionally be useful for converting an existing document into HTML for incorporation within an established site.

I therefore propose listing a few of the main points which I consider important when a site must be designed or modified, whether it is to be done by a professional or somebody less qualified. It has been said that a critic is somebody who does not know how to do what he is criticising. I shall exempt myself from this remark as I have designed over a dozen sites of varying sizes and complexity, for third persons as well as for my own purposes. I do not claim that everything I have done is perfect, especially as third parties frequently have ideas which I implement, even though I am not sure that they are suitable for the work in question.

Home page

The home page of any site is by far the most important one because it must convey the company image effectively and simply. My personal recommendation is that it should download to the viewer as rapidly as possible. Anyone who "surfs" the Internet will know that, if it takes more than a given length of time, he will interrupt a download and go elsewhere. My experience is that, if possible, the home page should be as simple as possible and should not exceed a total length of 20 or, at the outside, 30 kilobytes for the aggregate of all the files (a couple of years ago, I used to give the limit at 15 kilobytes, but most "surfers" have faster modems than 4.8kbps now). This usually excludes the excessive use of graphics, including publicity. My feeling is that third-party publicity, especially banners, detracts from the message which you are trying to convey: if you prefer to put emphasis on other companies' products or services, then do not be surprised if it takes away interest from your own. Another point which is undesirable in a home page particularly, but in all pages generally, is the use of frames. These have the disadvantage that each screen must download more than one file and therefore takes longer, frequently breaking up the image of the screen and detracting from the interest.

The menu system of the home page is also important. The three most popular ways are to have a menu:

• •

  horizontally across the top;

• •

  vertically down the left hand side;

• •

  within the body of the text.

All three of these have their advantages and disadvantages, but I must admit that I prefer the second solution over the other two, provided that this is consistent throughout the site. The reason for this is that it allows more pages to be linked without the page looking cluttered. On the other hand, for subsequent pages, I prefer using the "horizontally across the top" solution for navigating backwards.

The choice of colour and style is also obviously important. In order to make the text easy-to-read, I would suggest that the page background be in a pale pastel colour. The text should be black or dark to provide an adequate contrast. In my opinion, the use of a dark background, even with white lettering, is difficult to read and, with some browsers, cannot be printed out, thereby reducing the commercial interest of the page. Patterned backgrounds can add interest to the page provided that they are not obtrusive and are limited to a graphics image size of about 2 kilobytes or less. I suggest that simple fonts be used, such as Times New Roman and Arial. The use of other fonts depends on whether the computer at the far end has the same fonts in memory, otherwise it will default to Times New Roman (or something similar if it is not a PC) and the special effects may be lost. I strongly recommend that the same style of page be used throughout the site in order to give the feeling of consistency to the viewer. Do not switch colour schemes on every page.

Navigation

It is very important that the navigation within a site be as simple as possible. A very small site with up to ten pages will probably rely essentially on a home page leading directly to the daughter pages in a single vertical hierarchical step. For sites with up to 100 pages, it is best to use a mixed hierarchical system, limited to about 12 daughter pages accessible at one time and six or seven vertical hierarchies. Figure 1 illustrates a site with about 50 pages. The home page has 12 daughter pages which, in turn, have three sets of pages, totalling 12, in the third level of hierarchy, and so on down to the fifth level, which dies out with just one and three pages in separate subsets. It is interesting to note that the fourth level of the hierarchy is the one with the largest number of pages. It is quite common to find the second- and third-last levels to contain most of the information in a well designed site. If the site has more than about 15 pages, it is very useful to put in a page with a site map or table of contents and another with a search facility to provide additional help for the viewer to find what he wants. Plan your hierarchy carefully.

Figure 1 Hierarchical view of the pages in a typical medium-sized web site with key pages pointed out

Large companies often require more than 100 pages. This becomes embarrassing from the point of view of navigation, because it is almost impossible to be sure that the required information is easily accessible for the person in front of his cathode-ray tube. The easy way round this is to have separate sites for each division of the company. If preferred, this may be achieved with the help of sub-webs, each with its individual home page. This is easy to achieve, costs no more and allows each division tohave its particular theme. The only proviso is that the general company home page menu should have links in its menu to each divisional sub-web or site.

If a page is very long and cannot be split into daughter pages or has many graphics, it may be useful to calculate the aggregate number of bytes and indicate the length on the links to that page. This will warn the user that the page in question may take some time to download. The easiest way of finding the aggregate length of a page is to load it into your browser, right-click on the page and select View Info. This will list all the files used in making up the page and by clicking down the list one by one, you can see the length of each one: just add up the lot. If you do decide to warn viewers on long page lengths, this would be most useful over 50 or 60 kilobytes.

Graphics

This is the thorniest and most abused subject in the whole field of creating webs; it is also the least understood and this lack of understanding is the reason for the abuse. There are a number of golden rules for the use of graphics within a web site. Follow these, and you will find that your site becomes much more successful.

The first rule is the choice of format. For the sake of this article, we shall limit our discussion to GIF and JPG formats alone. There is a lot of confusion as to which format should be used in any one situation. This is because of the overlap created by there being no clear-cut boundary. The rule of thumb is that JPG formats are best used for colour photographs or very complex artistic creations with more than 256 colours and GIF format for line drawings with less than 256 colours or monochrome photographs. In both cases, it is best to adjust the size and resolution in your graphics package before generating the formatted files. It serves no useful purpose to make the image file larger or with a higher resolution than that which will be used on the actual web page, but it does make the file size much bigger to the detriment of download time and without any compensating advantage whatsoever. To do this, load your file into a bitmap editing graphics package, such as PhotoPaint or something similar. Adjust the size to that of your final image in your page. If it is to be a GIF file, reduce the number of colours to the minimum, but never more than eight bits. Select interlaced loading. Adjust the resolution to 75 dpi and then save your file. In all probability, you will find that it is no more than a few kilobytes long. In the case of a JPG file, adjust the size and resolution as before and, when saving the file, you will find that there is a control which allows you to adjust the compromise between file size and definition. For most photographs, it is satisfactory to put this somewhere in the middle of the range.

If it is necessary to offer your viewers a photograph exceeding about 4 by 5 centimetres, I suggest that you place a thumbnail image, say 2 by 2.5 centimetres, in your file and use this as a link to the full size image in a separate page. This will avoid the long download time inherent in a large image, until the viewer specifically requests it. This may seem to contradict the notion that an image is worth a thousand words, but is it worth waiting two or three minutes of on-line time? This method does allow your reader to make the decision according to his own needs.

A clean web page cannot exist with a plethora of photographs or other images. It is suggested that the number on any single page be kept to a minimum. This is not just a question of the time required to load the pictures but it is also too easy to make the page look cluttered. In addition, the images do take up space from the text, forcing the need to scroll more, something which some people do not like if it can be avoided.

Another thorny subject is that of animated images. I recently came across one which required 1.5 megabytes of file space. It was made up of 75 different images. Although the subject was quite amusing, this kind of thing has no place in a company's web site. At a more reasonable level, there are many small animated GIF images of less than 10 kilobytes. If you like, these may be used on short pages which otherwise do not have much in the way of graphics.

Search engines

For a page to be successful, it must be easily found. Obviously, you will try to have as many links as possible between your site and those of professional organisations and other established sites. However it is very important that your site comes up on search engines when you offer certain keywords. Unfortunately, there are over 500 search engines used on the web, of which a dozen or so are important. Even more unfortunately, most of these operate under different criteria of search. When you offer your URL (your specific address) to a search engine, it is usual for a "spider" (a special analytical system) to have a look at your site in the middle of the night. This tool will examine your home page and, possibly, some other pages within your site to extract what it thinks should be your key words ­ these may be different to what you would like. The best way of ensuring that the "spider" records what you want is to have the titles of each page as explicit as possible and to put in a list of meta keywords (which will not be seen) on the home page. Do not be tempted to put in the same keywords several times, because some "spiders" will ignore them altogether. It is better to put in as wide a variety of keywords as possible. In most cases, submission of your site to a search engine is free-of-charge but this is quite a laborious job. There are a number of companies which offer to submit your URL to a given number of search engines either free-of-charge or for a nominal sum. The ones which charge a few tens of dollars are usually more effective in order to obtain repeat business. Re-submit your site after any important changes or every six months or so.

I should like to offer one small word of warning. Many companies put their competitors' names within the list of meta key words. This means that if John Smith has Joe Bloggs' name as a keyword, anyone searching for Joe Bloggs may be offered John Smith's site, even at the top of the list. To say the least, this practice is unethical, even if common. In many countries, it is even illegal to use a competitor's name for your own publicity. Never think that you are safe doing this by the lack of visibility, because the list of meta keywords is easily accessed with any web browser and you may be sure that your competitor will object (unless, of course, he does the same!).

Communications

One of the most frequently forgotten things is to make sure your address is easily visible, especially on your home page and anywhere else it may be necessary. You would be surprised how many sites there are on the web with no postal address, telephone or fax numbers and sometimes even no e-mail address! I suppose the authors must think that if you have found the pages, you must be clairvoyant enough to find out where they are! Many companies offer a form as the only means of communication from the web site to them. This is a cardinal error, especially if the form asks for required information that the user may consider irrelevant to the company's needs. By all means, put in the form, but put in an e-mail hyperlink as well, so that a choice is offered. No-one likes to be forced to give information that he thinks is not necessary. A good example of this abuse is to access Microsoft's support pages, which can be done only after answering many apparently irrelevant questions.

Along the same lines, you may be tempted to put in a cookie. A cookie is a small amount of data which you force into a special file or directory on the visitor's hard disk. Even if the data are harmless, many users feel it is an intrusion on their privacy to have someone else's data on their hard disk. However, many surfers set their browsers to warn them when a cookie is about to be recorded and go no further into the site when the warning is given. Is it worth the risk of losing a customer to obtain a little extra information about him and his habits in visiting your site?

I believe that the above criteria are what make the difference between a good technical and commercial site but, of course, it is also necessary to have as much information as possible on your products. This does not mean that you have to reproduce the paper data sheet in all its forms. Modify the information in such a way that, for example, the graphics, the specifications and so on are on different interlinked pages. This is preferable to having a single PDF or other file which must be downloaded, although this kind of technique is useful under certain circumstances. It should not be forgotten, either, that if data are to be found in downloadable files, the key words for these data will not be retrieved by a search feature or engine.

Before concluding, there is one feature which almost inevitably is requested when asking for a site to be designed for the first time. This is a "hit" counter. Do not be deceived. This does not serve any really useful purpose and can be frightening for readers. If someone sees that he is the 507,633,222nd visitor to the site of a company in our line of business, he will not believe it and the company's credibility suffers. On the other hand, if he sees he is only the 89th visitor, then he will say that the site cannot be worth visiting and go elsewhere, even if it is stated that the counter was reset only last Thursday. And what will this counter do? It will click up one when somebody loads your home page (it is even less practical to have one on each page), but won't budge if he goes directly to another page from a hyperlink or a search engine. It therefore gives no useful information. Worse, it either refers to a third party's page, needlessly and unreliably prolonging the download time, or it has an internal CGI routine which also prolongs the download. If you use an Internet Service Provider's server, most reasonable hosting services offer a full statistical analysis of visits to each individual page with a legion of other useful information. Although it cannot differentiate between an aborted download and a full one with time to read the contents, it is far more useful than a simple "hit" counter as it shows the relative popularity of all your pages with no overheads. On the other hand, if your server is "in-house", you may need to buy some extra software to have an analysis available.

Finally, although it is not perfect by any means, I believe my company's site follows many of these precepts. It consists of a single-page home page and two sub-webs. The home page is as simple as can be made, but has two meta lists of keywords. It offers the viewer the choice of going to the home page of either of the two sub-webs, one of which has moderate minimised graphics and the other has no graphics at all, for faster downloading. Both have exactly the same hierarchy and pages. Statistics show that the graphics files are used by about 55-60 percent of the visitors but the fact that over 40 percent preferthe text-only files show how important fast downloading is. There are also a number of other sub-webs, most of which use these same precepts. These may be found at the following URLs (I am not giving these to promote our own or others' interests but simply as examples of what I have been trying to say).

Protonique home page: http://www.protonique.comGraphics sub-web: http://www.protonique.com/psagraphText sub-web: http://www.protonique.com/psatextProtonique web services home page: http://www.protonique.com/webservA Cypriot company: http://www.protonique.com/envirotechA Cypriot real estate developer: http://www.protonique.com/cyphomesUN Environment Programme Committee: http://www.protonique.com/unepstoc

Note

1 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, I, iv.