Datasheet

Crowder c01.tex V3 - 05/26/2008 7:16pm Page 27
The Basics of Building Web Pages and Sites 1
Focusing on goals
Every Web site, in order to be successful, must fulfill some sort of need for its visitors. The word
‘‘need’’ doesn’t have to be interpreted too strictly. After all, how many people really need a $400
leather jacket? Or a handcrafted miniature car? Yet, there are sites that are successfully selling
such items.
Your goals must be set by one key rule: The average person visiting your site should walk away
happy. The key to making your visitors happy — and making them want to come back again and
again — is to satisfy people’s desires. Most Web site designers make the mistake of assuming that
people only come for what they really have to have — or, more accurately, what the designer
thinks people really need. That’s a fatal error to make. On the Internet, people are still people
and, as in the outside world, people are driven more by emotions than by logic.
Put yourself in the shoes of your potential site visitors and take a look at what you’re offering.
Does your site solve their problems (or, more accurately, their perceived problems)? Does it pro-
vide them with the information or products they’re looking for? Does it do it all that easily,
without making your visitors work too hard to get what they want?
Deciding on complexity levels
How deeply are you going to get involved in Internet technology? When we’re talking ‘‘technol-
ogy’’ here, we mean both the hardware and the software — not just on your end, but on your
site visitors’ end, too.
Living and dying on the edge
Internet technology is constantly changing, and this means that you need to make one specific
choice — whether or not to keep your Web site on the leading edge of that change. The leading
edge is often sardonically referred to as ‘‘the bleeding edge,’’ because lots of people and companies
have suffered tremendously by trying to stay up with it.
The reasons for this are twofold. First, leading-edge technology has much higher expenses. Sec-
ond, no one can guarantee which of several competing approaches will end up becoming the
standard. What looks as if it’s the most promising approach to accomplishing something can turn
out to be unpopular in the end, regardless of its technical merits.
Our best recommendation is to hang back a little bit and not join the latest rush to the New
Hot Internet Thing. But just for a little while — just long enough to be sure it’s the real thing,
and not just some fad that won’t pan out in the end. As soon as you’re sure that the change is
permanent and the technology is here to stay, move ahead with it. Let some other company do
the bleeding, then move in fast enough to reap the rewards — if there are any to be had.
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