Web Redesign Notes

[The CNE web site is now in its third generation, following a redesign I completed in October of 1998. I no longer maintain the site.

In addition, some of the following may be dated; bear in mind that it was written in 1996.--Emma]

Analysis of use

• Go through the logs. Determine who your readers are. What percent is local? What percent .gov, .com, .net, .edu, etc. What percent usa? foreign?
• Determine who is using your information & who you want to be using your information. Consider your audience.
• Which pages are popular?
• Which pages are not popular? why? (possibly because they are:
  • buried too deeply
  • hard to find
  • outdated info
  • no longer used, unneccesary
• Remember that hits are not a good judge of page use, file accesses are. A page with 10 images is going to have more total hits than a page with only one image. You want the number of actual file accesses for your page.

Evaluation of Information

• What information are you serving?
• What information should you be serving?
• Is there a better way to provide this information?

Design Considerations

• Determine the criticality of information to your primary audience and prioritize (format as well as accessibility). The information which is most critical to your primary audience should be the most easily accessible.
• Remove links to any page marked "under construction". If it should be finished by now, do so, else re-evaluate it.
• Reduce links from top page to a minimum. Choose subject areas from those pages that have the most file accesses. Consider designing 'tracks' for various subject areas, or have Beginner/advanced tracks (this depends on the type of information you are serving)
• Consider how big your images are. Remember they will be accessed by machines with low speed network connections (such as dialup from home) and you should keep your images (and file sizes) to a minimum. Do you need that picture? Look at the information you are trying to present. Is the image just something to make your page look pretty, or does it convey some meaning?
• Consider adding a search engine or an info index; users like this feature.
• Minimize use of browser specific extensions to HTML. Your pages should be readable by as large an audience as possible. If there are features you really must use, make sure that they merely add functionality, not detract from it. Users whose browsers can't see these features should not lose out.

Style

• Instead of "click here to download postscript file", say "This file is available in postscript"
• Eradicate laundry list style pages
• Decrease text on upper level pages
• Put "last updated" stamp on every page. People want to know that the information they are looking at is timely. Also put a contact address on every page.
• Always use "alt" tags. Never use imagemaps without a text alternative.

Author: Emma Kolstad Antunes
Date: May 3, 1996

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