Placing A Site on the Web

This page is part of the WebCom Web Publishing Guide. It provides a synopsis of how the World Wide Web works, and the implications of this for people creating sites on it. The WebCom World Wide Web Overview has more information on the Web itself.

Users and the Internet

A Web page is more than a "virtual storefront", different from a television or radio program, it is something completely new: a forum for the distribution of information to an audience which is potentially unlimited in size, in which the audience must consciously choose to access a particular source of information from a nearly unlimited number of choices. As a consequence, Internet users quickly become very selective in their choice of materials to view and sites to visit.

Therefore, good design and focused content are essential to creating a successful site. The result will be a Web site that grabs and keeps the attention of visitors, producing a constantly increasing number of accesses as links to it are created and word of mouth spreads.

The following are traits of a well-designed site:

• Pages are kept short, no more than two or three screens long at the most.
• Pages are introduced with a short description of their contents, and links to related material are provided.
• Individual sections of text are kept short.
• Understanding the content of a page should not depend on a reader having arrived at it from another page.
• Pages must communicate information in as clear, succinct, and specific a fashion as possible.