| The Bills Family |
| Doug, Cathie, Jenna, Ashleigh and Shannon |
By Doug Bills
Thursday, January 31, 2002On good Web design
I think it a necessary requirement for a web site designer to regularly go through the site and read it as a visitor would. There are two reasons for this
- To find and fix any technical difficulties (broken links, spelling/grammer check, page load times, etc)
- To make sure that the content is agreeable (interesting, relevant, up to date, accurate, etc)
As a good designer (IMHO), I have been re-visiting my site and there are a few things that I don't think are quite "up to scratch". It's early days yet, I know that the site will improve with age as I get time to work on it. But there is one point I would like to mention here... that is to do with content. All the articles I have written so far have been very technical.
I have defined the intended audience (which is a good thing to do so you can more accurately determine relevance, interest ...) in the first article, Who, what, where, why, when, how, as being friends and relations. And I have defined the purpose there also. I think that the technical articles so far have been directed at only a subset of the intended audience and so may have been a bit boring for some of you. I think also that I have been telling you all what I have been doing on the website and not enough about the rest of the family.
So what is he going to do about it?
Well I have decided to have a classification system. I will put a wee symbol at the top of all my articles indicating whether or not the article is a technical one or a more personal one. That way, you can decide beforehand whether or not you want to bother reading the article :-)
I am also thinking of dividing the articles up into two types - news and commentaries. This might be harder than I think because my writing sometimes is on the borderline between the two and sometimes includes both. But anyway, the reason is so that you can decide whether or not you want just the news of what is happening in the life of the Bills family or also want to read my thoughts and opinions regarding current events in the Bills family life.
I am still unsure as to how this will turn out so you will just have to keep coming back to see how the site plan unfolds :-)
Doug Bills is founder of AI Environments - a company developing environments having Artificial Intelligence.