getting the most out of your hosting and domain name money.
While you'll learn more, and get a more systematic understanding if you read the entire book, Bickner points out in the intro that you can also just plunge directly into the chapter that helps you solve whatever problem you're confronting right now. She says: "It is my hope that you will write in this book, dog-ear a few pages, and splash coffee on the cover...Let it become an old friend that you can lean on from time to time. Ignore the stuff you don't need, and enjoy the parts that help."
Particularly useful features include the Chapter Checklists at the beginning of each chapter, the definitions offered in sidebars throughout, and the Budget Threat warnings about the temptations to stray off course and spend far more money than you'd planned or is necessary.
But the single most useful thing Bickner does is explain what questions to ask before you get started with any part of the process. What are the goals of the site? What are the functional requirements? What are the technical requirements? Fail to figure these out in advance and you'll end up spending lots of money to fix the site after the fact when you find out, for instance, that it doesn't display properly on a particular kind of browser, or that it drives users away by taking too long to download.
Economy, as she points out, does not apply just to your investment but to the users' investment of their scarcest resource, their time. Usability is a matter of choosing "how you want your users to expend their mental energy. Do you want them to spend it learning how to move around your site, or do you want them to expend it enjoying and interacting with your site's content?" Since the answer to that is obvious, she suggests that you start your user testing from the moment you first sketch a design idea on a cocktail napkin -- and then keep on testing throughout the entire design process. Make the navigation clear, keep to a minimum the number of clicks someone has to make to find anything, and then watch people as they try to perform specific tasks on your site.
Never forget that the web site is about the user, not about you, she says. The only thing that is totally within your control, she says, is the words you use. Don't bloviate about how wonderful your site is, when you could be telling users exactly what they can do on it. Don't expound in endless undifferentiated blocks of text. "Remember that reading on the computer screen sucks and that your site visitors need visual relief if they are going to read anything on your site at all." Accommodate the way people actually look at sites: let them scan headers and bullets so they can decide for themselves which parts, if any, are worth their time and mental effort.
The chapters I found most interesting were on the topics I understood least about: content management systems and web standards. Again, Bickner outlines the questions you need to ask about what your content management system has to enable you to do. She offers a good overview of several content management systems in terms of how well they meet specific requirements, budget, and available skills; she also notes the drawbacks of each, such as expense and training time needed.
Bickner is unapologetic about asking you to design with web standards. Yes, she iss asking you to spend a lot of time up front. But as she explains throughout the book, time well-expended at the beginning saves time in the long run AND improves your site's functionality as well. By using web standards up front, for instance, you won't have to do separate designs to accommodate PDAs and meet accessibility guidelines. She also says that designing with web standards can save money -- I hand't realized that using obsolete code can cost you money because it consumes so much bandwidth.
This is a highly readable book as well. With clarity and humor, Carrie Bickner has made a compelling case that you can build a good web site without a whole lot of money. She's not only convinced me that I should design better, but she's presented a systematic method of doing so that seems like something even I might be able to carry out. I highly recommend the book.
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COOL QUOTE:
Limiting searches to free online sources can be wishful thinking that undermines the adequacy of a search. But having said that, let me also add that the expectation by the rising generation of researchers that full-text journal articles ought to be free and online is one of the greatest assets of the FOS [free online scholarship] movement. As Thomas Kuhn argued, doddering paradigms tend to topple not because someone produced sufficient evidence or a decisive experiment, but because the diehards died off and a new generation took their place. I welcome evidence that young researchers look first in free online sources. They should. That's by far the most convenient place to look. Our job is to put more information in that basket, not persuade researchers to start with less convenient sources. Students should understand that free online sources are not yet adequate in most fields. But the rest of us should understand that the best remedy is to make them adequate.)
Peter Suber, FOS News [now Open Access News], January 23, 2003 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
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