Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines Before, During and After

1. Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines Before, During and After Marieke Napier NOF-digitise AdvisorUKOLN University of Bath Email M.Napier@ukoln.ac.uk URL http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ UKOLN is supported by:

2. Contents • Here are some general issues that will come up when creating your web site. • N.B. Many activities apply to various lifecycle stages of a project • Before • URL naming • During • Web-Based Dissemination • Newsfeeds • After • We’ve Been Here Before • Mirroring, Migration & Preservation • Conclusions Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

3. Before…. Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

4. URL Naming Policy • Issues: • Having your own domain is a good idea (e.g. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/) • Short URLs are good (more memorable; search engines tend not to index deeply) • Sub-domains may be a useful compromise (e.g. http://ariadne.bath.ac.uk/) • Keep URLs short by using directory defaults: • www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue5/metadata/intro.htm • www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue5/metadata/ • Shorter, less prone to typos and allows for format and language negotiation, new server management tools, etc • …/issue5/metadata/intro.fr.html • …/issue5/metadata/intro.pdf (.cfm, .asp, .jsp) Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

5. During…. Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

6. Web Site Promotion • You want: • Your quality pages to be found in a timely fashion by users of search engines • To encourage others to link to you • To ensure this happens you should: • Have a domain and URL naming policy • Exploit the Robots Exclusion Protocol - see <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html> • Be aware of barriers to robots (which may also be barriers to humans) • Think about metadata • Think about a linking policy and procedures Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

7. Web Marketing • Sites linking to you • Swapping links, short and persistent urls, having a logo or icon to put on people’s pages, bookmarks, citations • Mailing lists,– JISCmail - tailor your messages and don’t forget to advertise internally • Search engines and directories • Join industry hubsites - subject related • Good site design Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

8. Your Web site Search Engines How People Find You • People type in URL from a freebie or • refereed journal (article on subject) • 2. People follow a link • 3. Search engine Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

9. Search Engines: Site Design • Keywords - what are they, are they obvious, where are they? • Metatags • Links - frames • URLs - Short and sweet, avoid ?, *,~ and other strange characters • Bridging Pages • Database delivery • Robots.txt file Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

10. Planning Search Engine Strategy • You search for your project name and find a personal page of a former colleague with informal information  • To avoid this: • Distinguish between (a) initial information about the project (b) information for project partners, funders, etc. and (c) information for end user • Use search engine techniques to: • Ban search engines from indexing certain pages • Register key pages (e.g. list of new resources) as appropriate Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

11. Metatags • <meta name="keywords" content="SCRAN, scotland, scottish, scot, gael, scran, alba, past, history, image, identity, scran, ethnography, archaeology, scran, education, school, college, university, museum, gallery.."> • Dublin Core (DC) • Resource Discovery Framework (RDF) • Issues with metadata • Spamming • Variations of Keywords • Search Engines that don’t support Metatags - Excite, Fast, Google, Lycos Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

12. Relevancy Ranking • Location and frequency method • Problems • Popularity method • Important pages? • Reviewed sites • Metatags • Payment Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

13. Submitting your Site • Submit key pages • Submit to key search engines: AltaVista, Excite, Google, HotBot Lycos, Northern Light • Submit manually from Search Engine Web sites • Use a submission application or Web service Add a URLGoogle.com Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

14. Robots • Make use of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to ban robots from indexing : • Non-public areas (e.g. area for partners) • Pre-release Web sites • Pages prior to an official launch • Remember to switch off ban after launch! User-agent: * Disallow: /partners Disallow: /draft Note: /robots.txt in Web root Note that use of directories to group related resources will have many benefits: controlling indexing robots, mirroring and auditing software, etc. Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

15. Accessibility • Robots have similarities to the visually impaired • Good design for robots is likely to be good design for people with disabilities (and vice versa) • Make use of tools such as Bobby, WAVE, etc. to check accessibility – see <http://www.cast.org/bobby/> You should formulate plans for making your Web site search-engines friendly and accessible Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

16. Problems • Why isn’t my site appearing on any Search • Engines?!!? • URLs • Frames - <NOFRAMES> tags • User-agent negotiation • Robots.txt file • Database delivery • Javascript • Flash and other proprietary formats • HTML • Free Web site hosting Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

17. Measuring Your Success • Checking your URL • Search for Spiders • Botwatch • Statistics • Referrer information • Refine keywords • Link popularity host:cultivate-int.org/ url:cultivate-int.org/ domain:cultivate-int.org/ Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

18. Other Ways Of Dissemination • Users find your Web site by: • Search engines • Following a link • Entering a URL which they found on a mouse mat, pen, in an article, etc • Links to your Web site are valuable as they: • Drive traffic to your Web site • Improve ranking in citation-based search engines such as AltaVista • Possible problems with links: • “Link-spamming services”  • Being in the “Web sites that suck” portal • Resources needed to encourage linking Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

19. Encouraging Links • You can: • Submit to directories (e.g. Yahoo!) • Use directory (and search engine) submission services • Have clear entry points with static URLs for key menu pages • Think about who you want to link to you and why they would do so • Target them and think of motivation (e.g. attractive small icon) • Monitor trends in links to your Web site (e.g. try <http://www.linkpopularity.com/>) Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

20. Of Interest? News Feeds • Providing automated news feeds which can be included in third party Web site with no manual intervention is a good way to support dissemination Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

21. Extension to News Feeds • The RDN (Resource Discovery Network): • Wants to provide news feeds about developments by RDN hubs • It’s using the RSS standard for news feeds (and XML/RDF application) • A CGI-based RSS parser (and authoring tool) has been created • To allow potential users to try it out easily, a JavaScript parser has also been written • See <http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/> Can this (slightly) heavyweight CGI solution be complemented by a lightweight JavaScript solution be used within your NOF-digi project? Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

22. After Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

23. What Happens When The Funding Stops? • When the NOF project funding finishes what happens? • The project gracefully turns into a fully-fledged service, with new funding from NOF, the EU, your organisation, etc. • The project staff all leave and the Web site is shut down, is moved and can’t be found, or is broken and there is no-one with the interest, expertise or permissions to fix it Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

24. We’ve Been Here Before • The UK Higher Education sector has been here before: • CTI Projects • CBL applications locked into obsolete hardware • TLTP Projects • CBL developers using Toolbook on standalone PC, which could not be deployed on campus LAN • eLib Projects • Web sites disappear • EU Programmes • … Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

25. Survey of eLib Web Sites • WebWatching eLib Project Web Sites • Ariadne article published in Jan 2001 • Of 71 Web sites, 3 domains no longer available and 2 entry points have gone • LinkPopularity.com results shown: • Survey also includes: • Analysis of entry points (links, HTML, accessibility) • Nos. of pages indexed by AltaVista- 0 in some cases  • Due to robots.txt file • Due to frames interface or other robots barrier • See <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/web-watch/> SOSIG 7,076OMNI 5,830EEVL 3,865History 2,605Netskills 2,363Ariadne 2,144 … xxx ~10 Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

26. Yes Never Domain Page Gone Gone 65 16 11 12 Survey of EU Web Sites • WebWatching Telematics For Libraries Project Web Sites (Fourth Framework) • Exploit Interactive article published in Oct 2000 • Web site availability: • Server details: Apache – 41 IIS – 10 NCSA – 3 Netscape – 3 Other – 6 (e.g. Mac, GN) • See <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/webwatch/> Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

27. Mirroring and Preservation • Another way to maximise impact of your Web site is for it to be mirrored: • Use of Web mirroring software to install service at another location (e.g. overseas to overcome network bandwidth problems or behind a firewall) • Issues about whether you are mirroring output from a service or the service itself (affected by push vs pull mode of mirroring) • NOF, for example, may wish to mirror your service in order to preserve it (once funding runs out and everyone leaves) Note that you may wish to mirror only the project deliverables Web site, and not the Web site for partners or the Web site about the project – another reason for having separate Web sites Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002

28. Conclusions • To conclude: • Make plans for the architecture of your Web service (URL naming, mirrorability, dissemination, etc.) at the start • Ensure your Web site is friendly to robots • Think about use of neutral resources which can be processed automatically by software (avoid the human bottleneck) Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines - 19 February 2002