Readability/Usability/Quality 4-01 (December 2001) by Alexander von Obert

"Everyone" wants to be in the Web. But why should he or she? Having answered the question: "How do you reach your goal?" You might be interested in my experiences. My Web site http://www.techwriter.de has been online for three years and enjoys some 300 visits a day.

 

Me too?

Some sites exist for their own sake. The author creates them instead of painting pictures in his spare time. Or you put your holiday snapshots there hoping that aunt Berta might enjoy them before the next family gathering - if aunt Berta visits one of her nephews who has Internet access. I am not sure whether this kind of exhibitionism on the Internet is necessary. I would prefer to design a family magazine and distribute 20 print-outs of it by (conventional) mail.

There are people who still dream of easy money through the Internet. They put lots of advertisement banners into their pages. But compare your access logs to the banner tariffs of established sites and you quickly lose your illusions: you might get $10 US per 1000 hits. You might even remember that you should pay taxes for this kind of income and suffer even more legal complications.

 

The Message

Your first question should be: What should be the goal of my Web site? There is more to this than appears on first sight. A few examples:

• You might decide to hide your site. A friend of mine found a very interesting and well paid job this way. He had placed his resume onto some Web space his ISP provides. He gave the URL to a head hunter who called him. This provided him the head start he needed.
• You could supplement your hobby by a Web site. This could give you quite some publicity among other enthusiasts. But you must offer some added value to them. More about that later.
• Some companies have their glossy-print papers converted. You might find the company address and the CEO's head and perhaps some atmosphere - but not much more. Such a site might cost you more than $10,000, possibly several dollars per visit. If some important people among your customers like it this site might be worth its money.
• You could use your Web site to offer some examples of your work. An artist might show pictures of his statues and publish the dates of his next exhibition. My goal was to show that I can organise and present complex materials. A company might choose to publish a glossary about its area of competence. The most important aspect must be: Offer added value to the surfer! Otherwise the surfer will never come back and will not tell others about your URL.
• If done intelligently, a Web site might help a not-for-profit organisation or self-help group. For possible clients this might be the only way to find the group and the volunteers might be relieved from other routine tasks. You could publish leaflets and other materials. But it will not work if you show prominently a membership application form and a list of your membership fees. As always, especially on the Web, you must offer added value.

 

The Form

Over the years many possibilities were developed to create ever more complicated Web sites: Everything blinks and jumps, 3D animations flow over the screen - there are quite some possibilities to express yourself. But do they help? If you are interested in repeated visits you should forget most of this. As a technical illustrator you must show a few of your better drawings. But your steady visitors are interested in especially two things: speed and content. If they are forced to wait for two minutes until your expensive Flash movie has been loaded they will hardly come back. You should enable deep linking. The favourites list then can directly point to the most attractive pages of your site. This alone should motivate you not to use frames (and they will disappear in one of the next updates of the TC-FORUM site).

Your bread-and-butter work might hardly be published on glossy paper - recycling paper might be more common. So why should you try to show that you might be able to create extremely complicated layouts? None of your customers might be interested in that. Use that freedom to create a simple, useful design. My own site does not even push the outdated HTML 3.2 standard to its limits. But it is extremely fast and easy to navigate. And it shows my special abilities in creating electronic documents, which is a big part of my message.

Bibliography

A Few Examples:

http://www.jump.net/~fdietz/glossary.htm

Frank Dietz's Glossary Links

http://www.prc.dk/user-friendly-manuals/home.html

Peter Ring's User Friendly Manuals' Website

http://www.angelfire.com/in/Limba/

Gherguta Translations

http://www.traduccion.cl/

Traducciones Alemanas

http://home8.inet.tele.dk/p-spitz/

Peter Spitz's Translation Links

http://www.cherrak.de/

Anke Cherrak

http://www.abc-brandenbusch.de/

Ûwe Brandenbusch

http://www.overlookhouse.com/

Walden Wired

http://www.soltys.ca/index.htm

Keith Soltys International Resources for Technical Communicators

http://www.islandnet.com/wordsmith/

Taylor Wordsmiths: Writer's Virtual Bookshelf

http://www.tech-tav.com/

Tech-Tav

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/8565/

J. Nesbit's English Pages

http://www.helpmaster.com/

Help Master

http://www.infodesign.com.au/

Information & Design Guides

"transline Deutschland - Übersetzungsdienst für technische Übersetzung"