Richter Scale^® Articles

(This column first appeared in the July/August 1998 issue of Dive Report)

So you’re still trying to figure out what to put on your Web site, right? Do a little market research to help you understand what might be the best design for your site. The beauty of the Internet is that market research is only a few keystrokes away. Start with visiting Web sites which offer services similar to yours. You can find some of these sites by using the various search engines that I discussed in my January/February 1998 column. Another way is to peruse the sales literature of your competitors, and locate their Web addresses, and then check out those Web sites.

As you surf these Web sites, take note of how the site looks and its impact on you. When a site doesn’t appeal to you, you should try to figure out why. Similarly, if you find a site to be attractive and usable, try and understand why that is. However, try to be objective when you do this, and also take into consideration how your average customer might view things - it’s easy to be overly enamored of ones own products and think that everyone else will be too, but that’s rarely the case. Once you take down all these impressions, you should have the foundation of what you might want your Web site to look like. At the same time, however, you’ll also want to make sure that you don’t accidentally make any serious design blunders, which is the purpose of this issue’s column.

My previous column closed off with a list of the top ten fatal Web design mistakes as researched by Dr. Jakob Nielsen of Sun Microsystems (a leading supplier of Web server hardware) a couple of years ago, but which still hold very true today. In this column, I’ll delve into each one of these design mistakes in greater detail to help you understand why they are a problem, and how to avoid them in order to have a top-notch Web site that people will want to look at and explore.

To help prevent you from madly scrambling to locate the May/June ‘98 issue of Dive Report to find the aforementioned list, I’ve included the list again below:

1. Using Frames
2. Gratuitous use of bleeding-edge technology
3. Scrolling text, marquees, and constantly running animations
4. Complex URLs
5. Orphan pages
6. Long, scrolling pages
7. Lack of navigation support
8. Non-standard link colors
9. Outdated information
10. Overly long download times

Let’s take a look at each one of these.

Using Frames
The average Web user views the Web at a resolution of 640 by 480. In layman terms, that means that his entire browser desktop has to fit into a space no larger than 640 pixels (the colored dots on a monitor) by 480 pixels. Even worse, a noticeable part of this space is occupied by the browser controls themselves, meaning that the part of a Web site that’s viewable at any one time to the average Web surfer is only about 620 pixels wide by 300 pixels high. That means your initial impact has to be made on the Web surfer in just that space. Fortunately, because it’s quite acceptable to scroll a Web page vertically, Web pages can be much longer than 300 pixels. However, it is not acceptable to force users to scroll horizontally - that’s very uncomfortable to the average person.

The reason I mention these size limitations is because some Web designers insist on using a Web feature called "frames", which allows the Web browser window to be split into two or more other windows such that each window can be separately scrolled. Frames are normally used to create menu windows or logo windows which don’t move when the main window is scrolled. An example is shown in Figure 1 below, which shows PADI’s Web site, which uses frames to separate its menu from the main content of its pages (note the vertical scroll bar next to the menu in addition to the scroll bar at the far right).

PADI’s Web site (http://www.padi.com) uses frames for menu access

There are a number of problems with frames, not the least of which is that they tie up precious screen real-estate, which is already very limited as I pointed out above. Next, frames make navigation via the browsers’ heavily used "Back" button (to go to a previous page) a challenge, because the browser doesn’t know which frame you want to go back in, and almost always has an undesired result. The same applies to printing a page with frames - it’s quite easy to end up with the wrong information printed. And, if you’re trying to make your Web site easily locatable via the numerous search engines, frames screw up that process because search engines don’t support frames. As if that weren’t enough, frame-based Web sites also take a little longer to load because the browser has to load multiple documents (never mind that frame based sites are difficult to design and manage, and some older browsers don’t support them).

Finally, if you take a look at the most popular sites on the Web, such as Netscape’s, Microsoft’s, CNN, Yahoo, Excite, etc., you won’t find a single one that uses frames. That’s pretty telling, isn’t it?

Gratuitous Use of Bleeding-Edge Technology
Unless you’re a real techie, this item shouldn’t be a problem for you, although if you use an outside Web designer, it may apply. In any case, bleeding-edge technology is whatever happens to be the Web technology of the moment. Last year it was Java and Shockwave, this year it’s something called DHTML and XML. Whatever these acronyms or names mean is actually unimportant. Why? Because bleeding edge technology means that only computer users with bleeding edge browsers and systems can take advantage of them, and that is a very small percentage of world-wide Web surfers. Why do something exotic if only a tiny fraction of the millions of people using the Web can enjoy it?

The best way to ensure that you’re not using bleeding edge technology is to make sure that your Web site views well and correctly in both Netscape Navigator 3.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 (the latter is impossible to use if you have Internet Explorer 4.0 thanks to Microsoft’s design). The 3.0 versions of those respective browsers account for over 90% of the installed browsers world-wide.

Scrolling Text, Marquees, and Constantly Running Animations
While neat looking, any sort of motion on a Web page tends to be distracting, and usually can add significant time to the loading of the Web page in a user’s browser. One not uncommon example of this is offered by the web site designed by interKnowledge for Bonaire (see http://www.bonaire.org), which has a beautiful rippled water animation of the word "Bonaire", but which is a whopping 160,000 bytes in size! (That’s four to five times larger than the average Web page size, and that’s only for one graphic element).

Another problem with animations is that with users running anything from an old PC or Macintosh computer to today’s powerhouses, the playback speed of the animations varies greatly, resulting in some rather unpleasant visual effects if run on a machine other than the type they were designed on.

Complex URLs
I went into this item some months ago, but to reiterate, it’s a lot easier to get to a Web page or Web site if the address (the URL or Uniform Resource Locator) is easy to remember and type. That a strong argument for your own domain name and a well designed site.

Orphan pages
As the name might imply, an orphan page is one without any related pages attached to it. It also refers to pages that don’t exist anymore.

All too often I see pages that have no links to anything and just strand the viewer, who then has to resort to the "Back" button on the browser (hoping he isn’t on a frame-based Web site). This is a result of poor Web site and navigation design (a sin of its own).

I also frequently click on links that result in a "404" error, meaning that the page the link pointed to has just disappeared, and the Web site maintainer neglected to update or remove his links.

Both of these are signs of a poorly managed and designed Web site. I will point out that the latter can be detected quite easily using a variety of tools. My current personal favorite is Adobe’s PageMill 3.0 ($99, see http://www.adobe.com), which is a Web page design program which includes a site management tool to help detect bad links. The site management software makes it very easy to fix incorrect links as well as track down links to non-existent pages.

Long, Scrolling Pages
While I mentioned earlier that vertical scrolling of a Web page is acceptable, it shouldn’t be overdone. In most cases, you’ll want to keep each Web page on your Web site to 2-3 "page downs" of scrollable material. More than that and you’ll turn off viewers because such pages take much longer to download and make it much harder to find specific information. It’s better to figure out how to delineate your material across several separate Web pages. The only exception to such a requirement is if the material is an article or paper, and therefore doesn’t make sense to split into multiple Web pages.

Lack of Navigation Support
One of the most frustrating things I find on some Web sites is poor or missing navigation support, i.e. standard links to other pages on the site. What this means is that I get to a page, and find I can’t get to another page in the site from there, or when I can, it’s a page that makes no sense to go to. Just as bad are sites that are inconsistent in their navigation. On such sites, some pages do a beautiful job of linking you to everything else on the site, usually via a nicely structured navigation menu (text or graphics), while others pages on the same site give you one or no options to get to other pages.

The trick to good navigation is to always provide at least one (if not two) sets of navigation controls on your Web site. One set of navigation controls should always be at the bottom of a Web page, since most people read top to bottom. If a second set is used, it should be at the top or side of the page. See Figures 2 for an example of this on the Sunbelt Realty site - note the navigation menu in the upper right of the Web page, as well as the one at the end of the main text. For consistency, this same navigation mechanism is used throughout the site on every page. Additionally, the navigation menu shows the current page in a different (non-link) color to help the user figure out where he or she is.

Sunbelt Realty’s Web site (http://www.sunbelt.an) offers navigation menus
at the top of the page as well as after the main text.

Another poor navigation decision is to use large graphics with "imagemaps". Imagemaps are hot-spots on a graphical image that allow people to click there to get to different Web pages. The original DEMA Web site (http://www.dema.org) design relied on such a graphic as the only means to get around the site, but they have fortunately changed that. This becomes a real problem when you realize that 30% of Web surfers turn off graphics in their Web browsers in order to make pages load much more quickly.

In order to avoid the graphical navigation problem, turn off graphics in your Web browser and then go look at your pages. If you can’t easily figure out how to get to any part of your Web site, you’re too dependent on graphics and need to change your design.

To turn off the loading of graphics in your Web browser use these directions. For Netscape Navigator 3.0, simply go to the "Options" pull-down menu and click on the "Auto-Load Images" menu item. With Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, use the "View" menu to select the "Options…" dialog box. Under the "General" tab, un-check the box that says "Show pictures" and click "OK". To undo these changes, just repeat the steps - in both cases these options are toggles.

Note that you may still see some graphics even after you disable the graphics viewing per the above instructions. That’s because Web browsers cache (store) copies of images you’ve recently viewed on your hard disk to retrieve them more quickly. If this is happening to you, use your browser’s help system to find out how to clear, reset, or empty your cache.

In any event, don’t rely solely on graphics for your navigation.

The final aspect of navigation problems to cover is that of not making contact information readily available on your Web site. In my mind, this is as bad as printing a great brochure about your business and not including your phone number or address. Make sure that each page on your Web site offers a way to let visitors contact you in case they have a questions (see the very end of the Web page in Figure 2 for an example - it lists an address and offers a link to an e-mail address (as well as listing out the e-mail address). This footer exists on every page of the Web site. For those wanting even more contact information, such as that of individual employees or representatives of a company, the Sunbelt site offers an "About Sunbelt Realty" page. The net result is that at any time, on any page of the site, a visitor can get in touch with someone at the company via e-mail, or at least get the information they need in order to do so via more conventional means, such as phone, fax, or regular mail.

Non-standard link colors
There is quite a bit of flexibility in the colors a Web designer can use to design a Web site. Unfortunately, this means that some people desire to make significant changes in the color layout of a Web site, including changing the color of navigation links. You may notice in Figure 2 that all recently unvisited links are blue (look at the navigation menus) while recently visited links are purple. Those are the standard link colors. Now imagine what happens if a Web designer reverses those… Chaos. Users will think they’ve visited pages they haven’t and vice versa, and the site will become impossible to navigate. Almost similar is the result when the link colors are changed into something completely different, usually done because an unusual background color or graphic has been selected, and the standard link colors don’t show well against it. The basic concept here is that if you change something that people are used to into something they are not, then people will have problems adjusting. And, if visitors to your Web site can’t figure out how to get around because you’ve done something "creative", your site won’t be very useful to them or to you.

Outdated information
Most people get very excited about their Web sites initially, and then as the newness of the whole experience wears off and people realize that keeping a Web site up to date can actually be rather time consuming, they slack off, and the result is a Web site that has cobwebs because it hasn’t been updated in a long time. Common signs of outdated information are announcements about an event that happened months ago, or prices valid only for a year gone by.

The only cure for this is to make updating and freshening of your Web site a scheduled event on your calendar, and then being disciplined enough to adhere to the schedule. Keep in mind that updating a Web site on a regular basis is also made easier by having a simple Web site design (i.e. no frames, no graphic navigation imagemaps, etc.)

Overly long download times
Perhaps the biggest Web site sin of them all is one I started to go into in my previous column, namely Web pages that seem to take forever to download. A typical Web surfer’s attention span is about 30 seconds for a Web page. A typical Web surfer’s connection to the Internet runs at about 1500-2000 bytes per second. The math is simple - if your Web page is larger than 45,000 bytes in size, including all the graphics, you’re going lose the attention of many visitors. I’ve had clients explain to me that their site is different, and that customers visiting their site won’t mind waiting a minute or two to download each page. No amount of discussion, Web statistics, or anything else will convince them otherwise. But, don’t fall into this self-delusional trap - most commercial Web pages are not worth waiting minutes for.

Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com), for example, keeps its pages at under 10,000 bytes a piece for the most part, to provide incredibly quick viewing times. In order to accomplish this, Yahoo! Uses minimal graphics, and relies instead on crisp, clean text and font formatting.

Now, I’m not encouraging you to follow Yahoo’s example completely, but moderation in use of graphics is certainly recommended if you want to keep Web surfers on your site, possibly converting them to customers. After all, it wouldn’t do to have them go to your competitor’s site because your site was too slow, right?

Conclusion
If you follow the above advice in designing your Web site, and combine it with a good, clean layout and design, your potential and existing customers will be able to benefit from your Web site, and in turn you’ll benefit too. A good, positive image on the Web implies you know what you’re doing, and that builds confidence in your products and services. And confidence is easier to turn into sales than mistrust or annoyance.

In my next column, I’ll show you how to better promote your Web site to attract visitors and business.

(This column first appeared in the May/June 1998 issue of Dive Report)

As you’ve hopefully been learning via my columns, the Internet and the World Wide Web provide an excellent opportunity to get in touch with potential and existing customers. The Web is a great way to present information about your company and its services and products to the world. However, as with any marketing medium, it’s very easy to give people a negative impression if you don’t know what you’re doing. In this column, I’ll explain basic Web site design philosophy so that you can avoid creating a negative impression immediately, and instead build a positive one from the moment a visitor enters your Web site.

Convenience
To understand how to create marketing material of any sort, you need to understand your audience. One thing all audiences share in common is that they are creatures of convenience. Something that’s convenient will always be more attractive and interesting than an equivalent that’s less convenient. So, how do we define convenience?

Well, convenience has to do with ease of access and the immediacy of response and gratification. If the marketing material itself conveys convenience, then it will give the impression that the services or products described in the marketing material will also be convenient. Therefore, the information being presented has to be easy to read and peruse, as well as answer all the questions a person might have. Therein lies the key to good marketing materials in general, and good Web design in particular.

However, the Web adds another component to the convenience equation. While traditional print media, such as brochures or print advertisements, puts the information you’re looking for right in your hand, there’s a small but measurable delay in getting information from the Web. This delay is the result of the fact that all Web information has to be transmitted from one location to another, with the slowest link usually being the modem in the user’s computer. To make matters worse, the information trickles into the user’s computer, meaning that there is a direct proportion between the amount of information being viewed and the amount of time it takes for it to be transmitted.

The net result is that if you want to make your Web site convenient for your audience, you need to put lots of effort into making your information compact, while ensuring it stays easy to use. If you don’t put this effort in, it’s likely that potential customers will avoid your Web site in favor of that of a competitor who has made the effort to have a responsive and usable Web site.

Pictures and Words
Web pages, for the most part, are composed of two basic types of elements: text and graphics. Text is what you’re reading now. It can appear in a variety of sizes, be bold or italic, and even be in different typefaces.

Graphics covers any visual element that isn’t text. While you can design a text only Web site, which is certainly the fastest to view, text Web sites are generally only suited for archival documents and other boring applications. Graphics are what add zest and personality to a Web site and make it interesting for visitors.

Of course, zest comes at a price, and that is that graphics images can easily get very large in terms of their actual digital size. You can think of the byte size of a graphic as the amount of space it requires to store the graphic in a file on your computer. While each letter in a text entry on a Web site only requires one byte of storage (and therefore is one byte of transmission), a graphic element is much more dense. In fact, each colored dot of a graphic can be one or more bytes of data. In a worst case situation, a small 200x200 graphic element could require 160,000 bytes of data. That’s like 40 pages of double spaced text from a typewriter. That’s a lot of bytes. In fact, a typical Web surfer, connected to the Internet via a standard 28.8 Kbps modem, would need about a minute to download that graphic element if his modem connection were running at top speed. Try staring a blank screen for a full minute to see how much fun that is.

Fortunately, there are all sorts of ways to make graphics more compact, including a variety of special digital compression techniques inherent in standard graphics file formats. There are two types of standard graphics file formats in use on the Web, GIF (pronounced "Jiff" and JPG ("Jay-peg". GIF graphics are limited to a maximum of 256 different color, and are well suited for images that have been created on the computer. JPG graphics files are true-color, meaning they can contain images with a virtually unlimited assortment of colors, and are therefore ideal for photographs. All modern paint and image editing software, such as Adobe’s PhotoDeluxe, JASC’s PaintShopPro, and MGI’s PhotoSuite, can generate GIF and JPG files.

Navigation
It’s the proper combination of text and graphics, in an attractive layout, that make a Web site inviting and convenient. However, if you have more than one page on your Web site, you need to make it very easy for visitors to move around the Web site, and this is done with links. Just as a link on a Web site can point to another Web site, links can also point to other pages on the same Web site. Such navigation links can exist both within the body of the text on a Web page, as well as in clearly distinguished parts of a page designed to aid in navigation. These navigation areas, sometimes called navigation bars, can be text, graphics, or a combination of the two.

Navigation bars should be easily accessible, which means that they should appear near the top of a Web page and probably on the bottom as well. The navigation links should be self explanatory and concise as well. For example, if you have a page about your latest Frabistam offering, your link should be something like "New Frabistams" (assuming your visitors know what a Frabistam is). You should not have sentence long links, like "Click here to find out as much as you ever wanted to know about our new line of Frabistams".

A key part of coming up with good navigation for your Web site is to look at the Web site as a whole. You need to figure out what information you want to present on the Web site, and then categorize the information into a handful of key topics. If a particular topics has a lot of information in it compared to other topics, you can have a number of pages which cover that topic, accessible through the topics main page - kind of a Web site within a Web site. The best way to map out these relationships is to understand that a Web site is like an inverted tree. You start with the root (the home page of the Web site), and build downward from there. The figure below shows a sample Web site layout (courtesy of the Web layout tool in NetObject’s Fusion software) I prepared for a dive shop. Note that the figure shows the top level as being the Home page. Below that are topic pages labeled About, Training, Dive Gear, Service, Travel, and Dive Local. The Training and Dive Gear pages have additional descriptive pages below them.

A sample Web site layout for a dive shop.

By flowcharting a site, and mapping it out in this fashion, you can quickly figure out what makes sense where. In our dive shop example, making BCDs and Regs pages that have the same importance as the Training and Travel pages doesn’t really make sense, so we created the Dive Gear page to act as a topic page which does have the same sort of importance as the other pages at that level. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that the layout of your site does not prevent you from linking from any page to any other if you so desire. For example, the dive shop Web site above could mention that all training classes use AquaPro BCDs and then include a link to the BCD page in that text. That’s the beauty of the Web - you can link as much or as little as you like. Unfortunately, many people overdo it.

With that note, I’ll leave you with a list of the top ten fatal Web site design mistakes according to researcher Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., of Sun Microsystem, and in my next column I’ll delve into these mistakes in greater detail.

The Top 10 mistakes in Web design

1. Using Frames
2. Gratuitous use of bleeding-edge technology
3. Scrolling text, marquees, and constantly running animations
4. Complex URLs
5. Orphan pages
6. Long, scrolling pages
7. Lack of navigation support
8. Non-standard link colors
9. Outdated information
10. Overly long download times

(This column first appeared in the March/April 1998 issue of Dive Report)

My last several columns have gone to great lengths to explain how to get on and use the Internet as a power user. With this column, I’ll start taking you through the process of getting your very own Web site on-line, so you can join the thousands of businesses using this great marketing vehicle.

In order to get your Web site up and running we should take a look at the typical goals of having a Web site:

• Providing current, up to date information about your business
• A means for potential customers to contact you (or at least find your contact information)
• A way for potential customers to quickly locate specific information about what you offer
• Potentially, a method of taking on-line orders or requests

If we condense these goals into simple themes, first and foremost, a Web site is a marketing tool. Secondly, it’s a sales tool. Third, it’s a potential revenue tool. Companies which assume that having a Web site will drastically increase sales are almost always very disappointed with the results, while companies which use Web sites as a way to promote their products and services, as an adjunct to existing paper-based marketing materials are usually the most satisfied with the results. The biggest reason for this is that people use the Web primarily as a resource and research tool.

Remote or Local?
In order to meet this need of having on-line marketing material, via a Web site, you need to figure out where to put the Web site. Web sites sit on Web servers, and a Web server is a computer which "serves" Web pages to any computer that requests them, such as that of a potential customer. For those of you tracking computer terms, such a requesting computer is called a "client", which is how the term "client/server" comes into play.

Since a public Web site needs to sit on the Internet, it turns out that it doesn’t matter where your Web server is, as long as it’s reasonably accessible by the broadest segment of your potential customer base. For example, even though I’m on Bonaire in the technological boonies of the Caribbean, all my Web sites, and those of companies I’ve helped get on-line, are remotely hosted on Web servers located in New Hampshire.

In my case (and most cases, no matter where you are located), remote hosting of Web sites is very cost efficient, especially compared to local hosting of Web sites.

To locally host a Web site, that is host it at your company, you need a dedicated computer, a high-speed (real 56K bits per second, bare minimum), 24 hour a day Internet connection, and someone available to monitor and maintain the system, never mind the Web site. The Internet connection alone runs several hundred dollars per month, if not more. The computer will cost at least a couple of thousand dollars. And, the specialist will cost you quite a bit in hourly fees. So, unless you happen to already have all these components in place at your company, or have a very real need to have your Web server located on-site (and I honestly can’t think of any), you should look at remote hosting.

Remote Web hosting for companies generally runs between as little as $20 and $100 per month, with higher fees to be expected for large Web sites with lots of traffic and with special features, like secure credit card processing. There’s usually also a one-time set-up fee involved, ranging from $20 to $300. There’s no set formula as to the exact magnitude of the set-up and monthly fees, but generally, those companies charging very little provide very little in the way of assistance in getting people up and running with their own Web sites, while those charging more tend to provide more support. Note that these prices are for having your very own Web site composed of a practically unlimited number of pages, with your own domain name (see The Richter Scale, July/August 1997 issue of Dive Report).

I should mention that you may be solicited by companies which have an "umbrella" Web site that covers a specific theme like a region (Southern California, for example) or activity (like diving) on which to host your company’s Web site. Unless you have only a single page to post, and the match between your needs and that of the "umbrella" Web site is really good, you should look at getting your own Web site, as it will be more cost effective in the long run. Also, your own Web site and domain provide your company with its own distinct image, so you won’t get lost in the noise of an umbrella site.

In terms of finding a good remote Web hosting company, you might not need to look any further than the ISP (see The Richter Scale, May/June 1997 issue of Dive Report) you should already be using for your Internet access. Virtually all ISPs also provide Web hosting services, and if you have a good relationship with your ISP, you’re likely to be happy with their Web hosting too.

Putting stuff on your Web site is straightforward. If your Web site is locally hosted, you generally just need to copy the files that make up your Web site from a floppy onto the server. With a remotely hosted Web site, you update your Web site via an Internet connection instead. This is most often done with a program that handles "FTP" - File Transfer Protocol, a standard way of sending and receiving files to and from a remote server. Each Web site has its own special user name and password which have to be used in order to update the site with new files. So, unless you’re careless with this access information, no one else can update the information on your Web site without your permission.

Who Does What?
I’ve covered where your Web site sits and how to put stuff on it in broad terms, but a key part that’s missing is what that stuff is. In other words, where does the content of your Web site come from?

You have two simple choices: you do it yourself, or someone you pay creates the contents of your Web site.

The least expensive route is to develop the Web site yourself. However, that’s not always the best way to produce a professional looking Web site. You may remember when desktop publishing first became a new application of computers - people went crazy with fonts, formatting, layouts, and as a result, produced some pretty ghastly things, solely because they could (and because they didn’t know better). Creating and publishing Web sites is just the next evolutionary step in desktop publishing, if you think about it. That means that it’s really easy to produce pages with great information about your company and its products, but not so easy to make those pages look polished and visually balanced and therefore attractive to passersby.

The most expensive route is that you hire a large firm that specializes in advertising or creating marketing materials. They know how to make things look good, but probably don’t have a great understanding of your business or products. You pay these people by the hour, most likely, and it can be a steep hourly fee at that.

As someone who consults on Web development, and occasionally does Web site design for pay, I’m sure I’m somewhat biased in saying that I think that the best approach to implementing a Web site is to get just enough outside help to get you over the rough spots, and then figure out how to best allocate your time and resources to complete the project. I’ve found that this way, companies who want to get on the Web end up with a Web site that they are happy with, and they have learned something about layout, design, and Web pages in the process. If this approach interests you, chances are that your ISP can recommend someone locally that their other customers have had success in working with.

How Do I?…
If you’re developing your own Web site, or working in conjunction with another person or company to do so, it’s important that you use the same Web design tools to get your job done. Web tools can be as simple as your word processing software (most packages these days offer the ability to create Web pages from documents), or as complex as high-end publishing packages. At the end of this article, I’ve listed a number of tools I’ve worked with, with prices ranging from $79 to $295.

Of these packages, there are a few noteworthy ones. If you’re looking at site design as a whole, and are familiar with desktop publishing software, I can definitely recommend NetObject’s Fusion. This software makes it really simple to build a multi-page site very quickly. Instead of the page by page approach most of the other software I’ve listed uses, Fusion has you start designing the complete site layout and style first, and then lets you insert pages as you see the need. Fusion automatically updates all the links from each page to all the others as you modify things, and also comes with a healthy set of Web site templates you can model your site after. A "lite" version of Fusion is packaged in as part of Netscape’s Publishing Suite.

To some extent, SoftQuad’s HoTMetaL Pro and Microsoft’s FrontPage do the same thing, but using different approaches. HoTMetaL Pro has you working on pages and then helps you combine them into a site, and FrontPage does much the same, except that it also offers additional features that require you to have extra software installed on your Web server, which I find to be annoying. FrontPage also make certain assumptions about how you want to do things in terms of creating Web sites and running the software, which in my case were very far off base. That’s a shame, because the Web page editor portion of FrontPage is actually quite nice.

In terms of the most complete package, Corel’s Webmaster Suite can’t be beat. It comes with a plethora of excellent graphics tools, page editing software, site management software, and lots of Web specific clipart.

If you want something simple to work with, on a page by page basis, then Symantec’s Visual Page, Claris HomePage, and Adobe PageMill all offer good page editing capabilities. I should also mention that most of these packages are available in 30-day trial versions off the respective companies’ Web sites.

Pitfalls
Now you have your Web publishing tools, your Web host, and probably a consultant or a company to help you create a Web site. Great! Well, you need something else, namely a plan.

In my experience, first time Web site owners have grand ideas about all the zillions of things they will put on their Web site, and how wonderful it’s going to be. In fact, I had the same grand ideas years ago when I first started working with the Web. Well, the reality is that unless you have unlimited human and financial resources, you need to plan your Web site deployment in stages.

The beauty of the Web is that it’s very dynamic. If you want to change something, it can be done very quickly. Taking this concept one step further, it’s perfectly acceptable to start with a small, one to five page Web site, and as you get more comfortable with the medium, expand the site to include more and more information and features. If you don’t follow this approach, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and end up with a Web site that’s tough to use and of questionable value.

It’s always important to maintain control over the Web site. Outside of the zillion page syndrome, a Web site can get out of control if too many people work on it at the same time without close coordination, or when you pass the effort entirely off to an outside company. In this latter case, the problem arises if there isn’t some sort of agreement that once the outside company finishes the implementation you agreed to and paid for, you own all the pages they developed for you. Part of the agreement should also state that you have the sole right to continue the maintenance of the site yourself or via someone else, not necessarily the original company that developed the site for you.

To emphasize this control problem with outside companies, several years ago here in the Caribbean, some companies came in, signed up a bunch of tourist-oriented businesses for Web page design and page hosting at high rates because that was the only way to go at the time. Now, as creating and maintaining one’s own Web pages has become a common and well understood effort, these same hosting companies are claiming copyright ownership of all the material they created for their customers, which forces their erstwhile customers to have to start completely from scratch for their own Web sites or continue to be held hostage.

Finally, another major set of pitfalls await in the design of Web sites, but I’ll have to let that discussion wait until my next column, where I’ll help you figure out what your Web site should look like, and explain what some common Web site design mistakes are and how to easily avoid them.

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Product	Company URL	Estimated Retail Price
Adobe PageMill*	http://www.adobe.com	$99
Claris HomePage*	http://www.claris.com	$99
Corel WebMaster Suite	http://www.corel.ca	$149
Microsoft FrontPage	http://www.microsoft.com	$129
NetObjects Fusion*	http://www.netobjects.com	$295
Netscape Publishing Suite*	http://home.netscape.com	$149
SoftQuad HoTMetaL Pro	http://www.softquad.com	$129
Symantec VisualPage	http://www.symantec.com	$79
* = Also available for Macintosh computers

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