This section isn't meant to be a complete and exhaustive analysis of the WEBsmith web page, but rather, simply an outline of my first impressions.

To start with, I'd like to say that what I'm most impressed with about the site is the sheer amount of information it contains. There's a lot of good material here, and I think our site has the potential to be the invaluable resource we want it to be. I have no complaint here; the only thing I would change would be to add even more information, to keep going with the trend that's already been set.

That said, let me go on to examine where I think some of the presentation of that information needs improvement.

In at least one of the articles I saw on the page that was reprinted from the paper WEBsmith, I saw a notation that's very common in print magazines: "See the side-bar . . . " And, presumably, the side-bar was included with the article, somewhere further down the page, although I didn't see it labeled as such.

The problem here is twofold; not only is a side-bar much harder to set apart visually on a web page than on the printed page, but they also shouldn't be necessary at all. As an example, see the side-bar to this article for more details.

As another example, have a look at our subscriptions page, and notice that it suggests if they want our public PGP key, they can finger info@ssc.com for it. Again--isn't this information we could just go ahead and provide a hypertext link to?

We're using HTML to get this information out to people--but we're not really utilizing it. When we have several articles reprinted here with related subjects, then we should really tie them together, with hypertext links.

My main concern with the page is that, while we have a lot of great information to offer, someone who has just arrived at the page for the first time won't know that at a glance. If they have to go searching through through our sub-pages, not just to find what they're looking for, but even to find out what we have--then they simply might not bother, and go looking elsewhere on the Web.

Here are a few examples of buried treasure to be found on WEBsmith's web page:

• The article Why Smith? can only be reached through the Essays page. This is an article that we feel is important enough to reprint inside every issue, and I can't help but agree; it gives a good insight into who we are and what we do. So why not have a link to it from the main page?

• The Penguin Archive--which, apparently, is from a mailing list or a newsgroup, although I haven't been able to find out from the page which it is--was something that I almost couldn't find my second time through the site. If I were a user who had seen the page once before, and bookmarked our main page as a reference, I wouldn't know where to begin looking for this material.

• While the main page is very helpful in telling you that there is new information on the page, it doesn't really say what's beyond that link--and as a result, it doesn't invite new readers to the site to see for themselves.

There are other examples, but these are the ones I noticed immediately.

. . . When it's an inlined image instead.

Your average person surfing the web isn't necessarily going to have the latest-and-greatest modem, so every image we add to the page needs to count; it needs to be essential for the look of the page, because otherwise, all it does is make the page take longer to load. People only have a certain amount of patience; every second that ticks by while they're loading out images is a second when they could finally get frustrated and give up.

HTML was designed to mark up text; there's no good and sufficient reason why we should be using valuable images just to form words. If we want to simply enhance the look of our words, there are many markup tags that will do just that.

If we want our pages to be as useful and accessible as possible, then we need to strip it down as much as we can. Using images for logos and other important design elements is fine--as I've done in these pages--but I don't see any need for, for example, the word "Welcome" on our main page to be a graphic, or for the menu buttons to be graphics, especially not when we end up with a smattering of different, potentially confusing fonts across the page. The readability and ease of use of our page should be our highest concern.

Which brings me to my last point . . . .

As important as I think it is for our pages to look sharp and up-to-date, I think what's most important is for our pages to present their information as clearly as possible--and there are several places where I think that graphic design has won out over how the content is designed.

Take, for example, the subscriptions page again. It uses some neat tricks with tables to get a visually impressive two-column layout--but does it really present the information clearly and well? It forces the reader to look up and down the page, and depending on the size of their browser, maybe even scroll up and down, just to get information that should be simply laid out for them so it can easily be understood.

I've seen several complaints from users in the time I've been here that our page was "too confusing", and I never understood why--until I finally looked at the page in a graphical browser.

Good layout should be visually interesting and impressive--but above all else, it should be an aid to better understanding, not an impediment.

In a similar vein, while it's certainly clever to use pulldown menus for such things as payment options, it might be more convenient for a user to be able to see at a glance that we accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express; a user unfamiliar with such forms might see only that we accept Visa, get discouraged because they only have a MasterCard, and move on. This is admittedly a worst-case scenario, but one that bears thinking about, and certainly one that illustrates my point; that we need to show what we have, not conceal it in style.

Now to show you what I have. By this point, you should have some idea of what my problems are with the pages. But any idiot can just sit back and complain; it only becomes useful criticism when it's backed by advice and suggestions. Read on for some of mine.