Copyright (c) 2000-2001 Steve Linberg, Silicon Goblin Technologies. All rights reserved.
This is a summary write-up of material and concepts covered in the final two days of the web camp. Days 4 and 5 were dedicated to discussions of project management, and procedural topics related to the whole business of designing, building and maintaining a website.
OK, we've covered a lot of the technical how-tos about web page creation, HTML, and multimedia. Perhaps more important than all of that, however, is the whole process of doing the work. Knowledge stocks your tool-belt, but making it happen is a whole different ball of wax.
In this document I'll also be reflecting on personal experience, in a very tangible sense: the creation of this documentation site. Although I have authored thousands and thousands of web pages over the last 5 or 6 years, the processes in some ways remains as new as when I started, and some of the lessons are hard.
It's easy to be casual about the whole notion of creating a website, even a modest one like this. In fact, I hadn't planned to do this site at all when the idea of the Camp was first proposed; I decided to do it as an afterthought because I thought it would be helpful. I recorded audio from many of the sessions with the simple intent to transcribe what I was saying on to web pages; I thought I'd be able to do it each night after the sessions.
The actual result is that I've spent more time writing the sessions up in this manner than the sessions themselves took. We did about 50 hours of training that week, and the time spent to create this site is now over 60 and still going.
Complicating the matter, as is the case with most people who do literacy-related work, is that this particular job is one of six that I'm presently doing. We all wear many hats, and all tasks seem equally urgent. This leads directly into the major points I want to make.
No matter what your creation process is, web sites always take longer than you think. Heavily-researched books have been written about project management because humans are notoriously poor at planning; we plan for the things we know how to do, but we can't plan for the unexpected. When we plan a website, we think about the things we already know how to do:
That's fine, but here are the parts we forgot and didn't budget time for:
This doesn't even get into coordination with partners, which you'll have to manage unless you're doing it all yourself, and maintenance and upkeep, which is a little detail we forget that tends to consume many times the creation time if done right. Much more on that below.
Jennifer Elmore, co-creator of PBS LiteracyLink, gave us very useful presentation on her experiences managing the extremely large LiteracyLink project. She touched on these topics and more. It's required reading for website planning, and it will help you to anticipate your time requirements much more accurately and realistically. You can find it here. I should have reread it myself before beginning this documentation.
It's true. I don't care who you are; you have less free time than you think. A million things are competing for your attention. It's easy enough to have and ride the initial burst of energy and excitement when creating a website, and the thrill of creation is real, but it wears off, and then other urgent tasks hurl themselves at you, and once the initial thrill is gone, your website is just another tedious task sitting in your to-do list, a chore like all the other tedious things you have to do.
And the result is that it falls by the wayside, 60-80% done perhaps, but not finished or ready, and by the time you grit your teeth and force yourself through it, you're so tired of the whole endeavor that you wish you had never started in the first place.
Do I paint a bleak picture of the whole enterprise? Good. Is it really like this? Yes, often. Why write such discouraging drivel for a how-to site like this? Because I always believe that it's better to go into a project with a realistic view of what it entails, and the fact is that although doing websites can be a lot of fun, it can be very tedious and difficult too.
The initial rush of excitement happens because it's new, and we make time in our schedules for new things. But when it's not new anymore, we see that the time we had thought of as "free" was really time we had set aside specially for this new and exciting task. Really, there are a million other things we need to do, and this website stuff is starting to get hard, and you know what? We have to put it down for a bit and tend to some of these other emerging priorities. And then three or four months go by and we realize, whoops! We were doing a website. People are waiting for it. Now we have to return to it, figure out where we left off, get the thing done. And it's a lot less fun than it was when we started.
You have less free time than you think. You really have to budget time for website development as if you were planning a chore, something you'd rather not do. Don't rely on your enthusiasm alone to carry you through the whole task.
I vividly remember the thrill of doing my first website: a silly personal home page, back in 1994 or so. I learned some basic HTML, tested my page in my browser, spun a few simple graphics, and transferred the files; I was live on the internet!
I went to my browser and typed in the live URL, and sure enough, my page appeared. There it was, for real! Anybody on the planet could see it!
I sat there for a while looking at it. It looked back at me.
Nothing happened.
The phone didn't ring; congratulatory emails didn't arrive in my box; no parade went by outside. It was a little bit of a letdown, honestly. All my hard work and excitement about being live had led to the creation of this cool new thing, my web site, but there was no round of applause or fruit basket or other reward.
Silly, perhaps, but the main reason most of us do websites is because we want to share our ideas and creations with the world. And we want the world to appreciate our work, use it, tell us what they think of it. So the deafening lack of feedback when we put our site up at last can be a little bit disappointing.
Here's the secret: the feedback will come. It just won't come right away. Don't be discouraged by the lack of immediate response when your site goes live. People have to find out about it. They need to find the time to sit down and read it. They need time to encounter other people and mention it for that word-of-mouth spreading of the news. Your readers are busy too, remember. But they will find your site - and the better and more useful it is, the faster they will find it.
They say that as soon as you drive a new car off the lot, its value drops by a terrifying percentage. Computers and other electronic toys become obsolete almost as soon as you unwrap them. Websites share some of this ephemeral newness, in at least two senses:
Anything on your website that is news or current-events oriented is instantly old as soon as it's uploaded and read by somebody. It's a moving target. Nothing will discourage a website audience like coming to a site expecting something new and fresh and finding last month's news. Especially if you have little "coming soon!" graphics scattered around the place - "Coming soon!" is a code for "I don't have time to think about this part right now, and it's going onto my to-do list with the other ten zillion things that are already there, so don't expect this anytime soon."
Anything on your site that's time-based needs scheduled, regular updates if you want to retain that fresh new-car smell and keep your audience returning.
Web sites and pages move all the time; the internet is a big squishy ball of goo, not a well-organized reference library.
One of the great strengths of the World Wide Web is that it makes linking and connecting to other resources so easy. One of the major weaknesses of the World Wide Web is that it makes linking and connecting to other resources so easy. We do it almost without thinking.
It's important to think very carefully when creating a link - let alone a "links" page with tens or hundreds. You are building a bridge. If someone moves the site you're linking to, or it just goes down, your bridge leads nowhere. This is called "link rot," and it's a major problem with web sites. Lots of dead links on a site is a sure sign that nobody's home.
Every single link on your pages, through your whole site, has to be checked on a regular schedule to make sure it still works. When links go down (and the only sure thing is that they will), you have to find the resource (if it's still out there somewhere) and update your links, or do away with it and potentially rewrite content if the resource is really gone.
Unless you're doing a website that is explicitly designed to be a never-to-be-updated, self-contained archive, you have the problem of maintenance and upkeep. Read on.
The final project-related point I want to make is that having a website is like having a new pet. Most of us tend to think about websites as a sort of "I'll put it up and then I'm done" kind of task. Meta-cognitively speaking: even I, now, am thinking as I write this, "I'm almost finished with this; it will feel so good to get it done, upload it, tell everyone about it, and then get on to the other zillion tasks I have waiting." However, that's just not the case.
Responsible web authors: realize that you are creating a new virtual space. People are going to come to it. Just because it's off your desk for the moment doesn't mean you're off the hook. You have birthed the creation of this space through selfless acts of pure will; it didn't exist before you came along. You are responsible for it, like Dr. Frankenstein was responsible for his creation.
There's no such thing as a throw-away web site. Or, at least, there shouldn't be. Dead websites don't help save the world, much. If you have something to say or share that's so important that you bent your back over the creation of this website for weeks and months, then own it! Nurture it, feed it, watch it grow. Listen to your users; keep it current and relevant. Better one well-maintained site than ten stale and dead ones. It's your work, out there for the world to see, and they will see it - and see it as a reflection of you. Don't let them see that you're too busy to tend to this place you created.
A web site doesn't have to consume your life. You can plan it so that the updates are small. You can keep it manageable. Hopefully, the points I've outlined here will give you some ideas about what kind of care and feeding a good website requires.
Go out there and create. Enrich the world with your knowledge and creations. Share your ideas and thoughts and passions. We've all got the printing press now with the Web. Use it well and do quality work with it.
Feedback, comments, flames, praise, suggestions and complaints on any of the material covered on this site are most welcome; mail me at steve@silicongoblin.com.
I hope you found these pages useful.
Thank you and good afternoon.
- Steve Linberg
Copyright (c) 2000-2001 Steve Linberg, Silicon Goblin Technologies. All rights reserved.