Library

Guides

Written requirements

Windsor Half Marathon

CRASH

Design guidelines

Briefs & proposals

Articles

Don't believe your web stats

The perils of mailing lists

Wasting money on web sites

dot slash ~ keep your URLs trim

Best-before dates

ISP surveys

1998 Central European ISP Survey

1996 UK ISP Survey

Library

About the need for written requirements, with two examples from projects.

A design approach to help people get around your site quickly.

This is a guide for companies and organisations preparing web site briefs, and for web development companies who write proposals; it discusses issues from both perspectives.

"Log analysers are not accurate. They over-report visits and over-count some browsers while under-counting other browsers. They cannot accurately distinguish spiders and robots from human visitors and they do not use fool-proof techniques for counting visits and visitors."

"Twice I've been on mailing lists with other web professionals when the issue of rates has come up. The first time, it was me who caused a furore; I replied to a question from someone in Argentina with a suggested price for their proposed service. The subsequent events determined what I did the next time the subject of rates came up on another mailing list 20 months later."

"Why is it that there are still web sites around that insist on making visitors sit through the downloading and playing of some elaborate Flash-type presentation, before then letting them get to the real site? What do the people who design and build these things think is the nature of web site visits, that it's okay to spend time and money on these 'introductions'?"

"Don't you just hate it when "index.html" appears in the page location when you're exploring your own web site?"

"Why don't people date the informational content on their web sites?"

This is a collection of the summary graphs and tables of a 1998 online survey we designed and ran which was completed by invited companies in Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

We were invited to give a talk at October's Networld+Interop 1996 in London. The title we were given was Internet Services Providers: Who are they and what are their business strategies?