Form or substance? Web Development on a BudgetPart I - The Axioms of Web PublishingBy Garnet R. ChaneyYes, I'll admit it: I love text. I always have. My grandfather was a typesetter, and it runs in my blood. Ever since I published my first book in high school using the mimeograph machine at the library, (sometime around 1980), I've been in love with publishing. That first book was my famous "How To Solve Rubiks Cube" in four easy pages. I wrote it at a time when all the other books ran on for at least 25 pages. I sold thousands of copies of that simple book, and taught hundreds of people how to solve their cubes.That book was written very simply, with hand drawn illustrations, and actually fit on both sides of an 8/5" x 11" page, which could be folded in half to create a pamphlet. I added a clear cover to give it some durability and substance. I published it on yellow paper, with black print. My later book, "How to solve Rubik's Revenge", ran to something like 20 pages, but was also the shortest possible solution for that drammatically more complicated toy. No one cared about the simple format of the book. When they saw me in public exhibitions regularly solving the Rubik's Cube in 35 seconds or less, or solving two cubes at the same time, (one in each hand), or even solving them with my feet faster than they could do with their hands, they wanted to know how I did it. Not one of them cared about the fact that my book didn't have a real glossy cover. They liked that it was short and quick. Every one of them liked that it was cheap, costing less than half what any competiing book cost. And I liked that, all except for a dime to the library, all the money from sales of the book stayed in my pocket. What does all this have to do with web publishing? As a pioneer of the world wide web who has published hundreds of sites and over 1.5 million pages since 1994, and had as many as 70,000 real visitors a day to just one of my sites, I am well qualified to comment on a few fundamentals of web publishing. They are practically axioms: - Every site should try to get as many free visitors from search engines as possible, it is by far the cheapest source of web visitors.
- Content is king, and words are the only content that matters to search engines.
- Unless your site is a museum or online gallery, eye candy will never bring you a visitor from a search engine.
- Too much eye candy can hurt your site by making it invisible to search engines, or by making it take too long to download.
- Most companies do not have a budget to support fancy web design.
- Fancy web design is a waste of money that should be spent developing better content.
- Over 95% of businesses are well served with simple an inexpensive template based web design.
On to Part II - Sticking to the Fundamentals | |
