Web Strategy and Web Sites

Publishing on the web is too often seen as something so special that it requires some computer whiz kid to provide the service. This is nonsense and such thinking has resulted in some very difficult sites.

Publishing on the web is first and foremost an act of publication and has much in common with other forms of publishing. Clarity and clean design mean as much here as they do for the world of print. For most users you are delivering approximately an A4 or quarto page on its side. Remember this (Running type right across the screen gives your reader something difficult to read. If its is not a spreadsheet, render the information in narrower columns. The lesson of a few hundred years of printing is not to be discarded.)

However, web publishing is capable of so much. Web strategy involves thinking in detailed terms about what you what to do with a web site. It can be as simple or as involved as you wish, but before you decide, travel along the web highways, look at what your competitors or parallel organisations are doing and only then decide what you like and don't like.

The first thing I venture you will not like is waiting for web pages to appear. This site consists of pages which will download in under 8 seconds. Often much faster. I strongly suggest therefore that web design should take into account that for the next few years, the bandwidth of the the delivery system will not allow the quick download of masses of images.

The sites should be content-driven. Leave huge pretty pictures for visits to art galleries, where they download in a millisecond.

We offer two services. One is the provision of web sites aimed at the journalistic fraternity and a specific or general public or market which is interested above all in the fast delivery of content.

The other is a web strategy consultancy, where the provision of the site may be in the hands of an in-house department or an outside provider. We can stand back and measure whether the site is doing what you want it to do. In very many cases, the site is not.

Sometimes the problem lies in the fact that the person or persons commissioning the site are not themselves users of the web in their day to day working environment. To often they make judgements on a static picture, forgetting that the web differs from ordinary publishing in a one highly significant way.

It is interactively dynamic. The way it reacts to what the audience demands is very important. There are umpteen million sites out here.

Can you bookmark your page for easy return to a particular page within the site?

Can you print out a page easily and/or incorporate the page in a report or presentation?

Click onto some household name sites and discover that you can do neither. This is about being client-friendly, about usability.

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