By Kenneth S. Moser, CNA, CNSA
APICS Director of Information Systems

We are building a site now and were wondering if you might be able to give us some advice. We are especially interested in learning what aspects or features you have found to be of particular interest to APICS members.

Also, what would you not do if you were starting over again — any hints would be appreciated.

At about the same time, one of my esteemed colleagues from the Communications Division reminded me that it was time to get off my duff and write this column. Never let it be said that I cannot take a hint.

In case you are wondering about the title, though, please note that much of this is simply my opinion. I have some experience working on our Web site and consider myself fairly well-informed, but I don't call myself an expert here. That said, let's deal with these questions in turn.

Our move to UUNET brings us a really detailed set of statistics on Web site hits and usage. According to these statistics our most requested pages in July were as follows:

I find it rather interesting that the certification page was accessed more often than the Quick Index. Log files also reveal that the two certification pages shown here are among the top entry pages (those first viewed when accessing the site) and among those accessed alone. These statistics suggests that certification is more important to our visitors than I would have guessed; if this pattern becomes a trend, we may put more resources into these pages.

Statistics also show that visitors are downloading forms we posted in Acrobat format (ergo, they can use them), spend a fair amount of time reading about Educational and Research Foundation grants (these are long pages!) and sending us mail, and that America Online is the single most popular Internet service provider (ISP) among our visitors. These figures also show that most of our visitors are using Windows 95 with Navigator 3.x or Explorer 3.x as a browser. None of this is a revelation, but confirmation is nice.

Of special interest: after the United States, Canada, South Korea and Brazil provide most of our contacts; and Tuesday is a light day for our site.

As to what I might do differently were we starting over, there's probably not a whole lot I can say that would be of any use to most of you, but I'll try. Let's start with the basics:

•First and foremost, make certain you have real content that is of interest to a wide audience. The average time spent on our site is less than 23 minutes, but the average Web page will hold a viewer's interest for less than 30 seconds. This 30 seconds is all the time you can expect visitors to take before they either drill down into your site or move on.

•Second, avoid the temptation to rewrite material that is available or more timely elsewhere. For example, if you want to refer to information that appears on one of our pages, create a link to it. Put the bulk of your time into material and services that will be unique to you and your organization.

•Third, unless they are famous or you are running a pinup site, avoid the temptation to waste time on biographies and head shots of your leadership or Web Master. This may be harsh but, aside from their mothers, NO ONE CARES! Ditto for hit counters on your home page — they are old and were always pretty useless.

Now for some quasi-technical advice:

•Use good tools — you need not spend a fortune, but you don't have to code HTML by hand anymore either. For what it's worth, we use Microsoft FrontPage. Also, make certain you preview pages in both Navigator and Explorer before you publish a new layout.

•Find a reliable ISP that can provide detailed statistics on page hits and site activity. Make certain your ISP supports your publishing tools — FrontPage, for example, wants a Windows NT server with specific extensions.

•If your site is more than two levels deep, make certain you have a site index or map so people can find their way around easily.

•Develop a clear, concise page layout and style and, unless you have a good reason to change, use them throughout the site.

•Avoid black backgrounds; they don't print consistently well and seem to be out of style now.

•Don't pepper your pages with useless graphics. Where necessary, keep your graphics small or make displaying them an option as we do for book covers in our catalog. If possible, use interlaced GIF as a graphics format; this will allow viewers to get the gist of an image without having to wait for the entire file to download.

•Provide e-mail addresses or a "Send us mail" function. Send mail to generic mailboxes (e.g., webmaster rather than j_smith) that can be monitored by several people. Use auto-replies to let customers know their mail was received and when it will be reviewed. Requests sent Sunday through Thursday should receive a response within 24 hours — sooner if you can manage it. Also, realize that you can expect the occasional flame and resist the temptation to reply in kind. Nobody wins these things.

•Learn about meta-tags and search engines and make certain the most important information about your site appears within the first 200 words on your home page.

•Make certain your organization name, postal address and telephone numbers are listed on at least one page on the site and that they are easy to find.

•Do not rely on search engines to find you — register your site.

Most important of all: Realize a Web site of any consequence will probably require a lot more work than you expect. For us, it's like publishing a 20-page newsletter every week, and we receive well over 500 e-mail messages each month.

You also must realize a Web site requires people to come to it. If your main purpose is to communicate with customers who need to receive the information in a timely manner, consider some other medium. For example, if your main goal is to make certain existing members know about the next dinner meeting, create an e-mail distribution list and send them mail. It's a lot cheaper. Likewise, if your main goal is to provide a lively, interactive discussion forum, consider a list server instead.

Web sites are best for attracting people who are not terribly familiar with you or your services and for members who need to consult your site for information every now and then. You need some very compelling, very fluid material to keep people coming back regularly.

We are in the processing of developing formal guidelines for developing a Web site and will share them. But I think what I've discussed in this article sums up the main points.

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