What Makes People Click: Making a page and putting it up

[content]

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in March. It is an ongoing project. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
[Resources for Program Marketers] [Program webpages (TESOL 2001)] [Bibliography]

Making a Page, Putting it Up, Maintaining a System

Making a page

There are three ways to make a page: first, hiring somebody, second, using what's known as a WYSIWYG; and third, learning the code yourself. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Hiring someone

Hiring somebody has more disadvantages than advantages, because you have to communicate so well with the people you hire, that you might as well do the work yourself. In addition, you are now doomed to continually paying for maintenance, which is always going to cost more than it's worth. It's unlike your car, in that you don't need tools and a garage in order to become self-sufficient; you can become self-sufficient with much less effort and expense, and at much greater savings. With the web in its infancy, whatever prices people charge for web design today are sure to change, but, even given a low price, self-sufficiency will be a benefit to you and your future.

If you do hire someone, though, make sure you have a thorough knowledge of what you want your page/s for, before you start. There are many universities that spend big money for fancy web design, but their pages are hard to navigate, hard to understand intuitively, and almost impossible for internationals with limited English. One good example is a university I know well with a flowery design, with its main screen acting as a newspaper of university news, i.e. what the president said about the agriculture grant last week; when probably less than 2% of viewers actually go to that page looking for news. Yet if you go there looking for an English program: good luck!

Wysiwygs

WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. These programs enable you to take things you know and love, like photos and text from your word processor, and put it on a page, as you make it, looking at it, and manipulating it on your desktop according to their system. Some of these are better than others, but both Netscape and Internet Explorer come equipped with them, and they are pretty handy, used by millions.

The immediate advantage of them is that if you are code-traumatized, you don't have to deal with code, or, you have to deal with it less. HTML is about the easiest code there is, but many people have big problems focussing on symbolic code messages and basic code frameworks, and prefer WYSIWYGs for that reason. There is a price you pay for this fear, however. First, WYSIWYGs make things more complex than they really are, by actually adding extra code; this is a product of the fact that the WYSIWYG program is a go-between between you and the page. This extra code is something every computer has to read, and makes your page a little longer-loading in every computer it is in. Still a small price, you say, but don't underestimate the value of simplicity, which really comes into focus when you try to change the page, or make a model based on it, or, finally, alter a page done with one WYSIWYG, while using another. Simplicity is superior in all these cases.

Learning it yourself

The price of simplicity is learning the code yourself. You don't really need a lesson or a tutor to do it, though these help. HTML is intuitive, and basic, compared to other computer languages, so you can learn what you need in a few quick steps; there are how-tos on the computer which will get you started quickly. People find it hard to believe that it's easy, but it is; this is one reason HTML became so universal so quickly.

To give only one example, I learned HTML (though not well) in my free time, and that has been rare for years. I have the kind of schedule that would make it difficult to find even an hour for a free workshop, which I could easily find at the university library. I'm afraid I might need something like that to really learn Javascript or Flash, but so far, I haven't needed them, and I've managed by using the system most language learners use: learn one thing at a time, in the order in which you need it the most.

You do this, basically, with the view: source system. When you are on the web and see a page that does something you want to do yourself, make note of it and return to that page when you are ready. Go to the menu and under VIEW, go to SOURCE or PAGE SOURCE and you will get the complete code that does what you like. It is not a copyright infringement to use the code that will do what you want on your page; you only have to worry about copyright when you are presenting text or pictures with the assumption that they are yours. So go ahead: select all, copy, paste, put it on your own document, start altering it according to your own needs, keep viewing it in whatever browser you use until it looks the way you want it to look, and then upload it to somewhere where you can still have access to it. It's a process that is so similar to learning languages, that it's a wonder more language teachers don't learn it. However, it's partly a function of time, and we all have time needs.

Putting them up

Most computers have a Fetch program, or something like it, that will allow you to put your finished pages on your university server; you will only need a password. My experience is that computer people in universities are pretty helpful in getting you started, and once you do it a few times you get better at it. Here is a rule that I've learned the hard way: Always make sure you check the page (a visual kind of editing) before you put it up. I check the links too. It's so easy to type one single letter wrong, and it'll be there, for everyone to see, until you come back to change it. People for some reason are not eager to point these things out: misspellings, broken links, a mark that finds its way on the page; but they make you look bad anyway.

After you change a page, by putting up the new version where the old one used to be, you might go back to make sure it's there, and it will look like it's not. This is because your computer has what's known as a cache, a storage for it to put a memory of recently-called-on-pages, so that it doesn't have to keep travelling to the server every time. It is giving you the cached version....and to get the new one, you'll need to clear the cache. If you don't know how, ask someone; it's not hard.

Creating URL's

One pleasurable thing about making pages is that you get to name them, and you find out that the URL system is a language of its own. You are now making your own URL's. I don't think URL's make much difference to search engines (1), but there is much about them that is interesting and that merits mention. First, some are easier to remember than others; obviously the shorter the better. Second, if they are too long (over 75 characters) they don't wrap on e-mails, so when people send a url to their friend, the friend's computer won't be able to access it on the web. Also consider the human tendency to miscopy: avoid "l" and "1" in mixed environments, where it isn't obvious which is which; and similarly, avoid "O" and "0".

System Management

The minute you put up your page, it begins to be outdated; its links may die (this is known as linkrot); and things begin to happen that jeopardize its integrity. Fighting linkrot requires constant vigilance (2), and the stakes are high. Having dead links jeopardizes your search engine ranking as well as your general appearance as active, aware, and up-to-date.

If you are forced to move your page, you face a dilemma. It is hard though not impossible to warn everyone who is linked to your page, and remind them to change their links (3). You must at all costs avoid the 404 message that people will receive upon trying to access your pages. Automatic redirects are useful for this purpose; however even they give the user the impression of being drawn in perhaps farther than he/she intended, or being led on a chase. Avoid this if possible.
Footnotes:

1. Search engines have so much other things to look for, that they don't need the URL; nevertheless, the individual fragments of URL's do count as words; just ask the schools and directories that put "studyintheusa" and similar expressions right into their URL's.

2. There are machines and businesses set up for just this purpose; some are free. The evils of linkrot are well documented and decried almost universally by lovers of the web (see Neilson, 1998 for starters).

3. Just type in "Link to: URL" with your URL, or some variant of this, into a search engine, and you should get a listing of all the pages that are linked to yours. "Should" is a key word here, because you don't. You can get a lot of them, though, and then just find and ask the webmasters.

Sources:

Kelly, Charles (1997). How to Make a Successful ESL/EFL Teacher's Web Page, in The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. III, No. 6, June 1997. http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Articles/Kelly-MakePage/

Kelly, Charles (1996). HTML Quick-start Page ITESLJ. http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Articles/web-page/.

Leverett, T. (2001).Webpage design for busy teachers- how I started making webpages.
http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/prdr3.html.

Leverett, T., and Kelly, C. (2000). Effective Webpage Design. CALL-IS Newsletter 18, 1. http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/prdr1.html.

Nielsen, Jakob (1998). Fighting Linkrot. Alertbox 6/14/98. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html

Stevens, Vance (2002). Learning and Using HTML, an excellent resource.
http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens//htmledit.htm

Other Resources:

Resources for Web Designers , good links.

Web Design bibliography

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

[ Effective Webpage Design ] [ Program Marketing ] [ Resources for Web Designers ] [ Bibliography ]
[CESL] [ CESL Teachers' Page ] [ webpage design ]
Page maintained by
Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
Photo above (Spider Web) by Jim Leverett.

What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

Making a Page, Putting it Up, Maintaining a System

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web