Follow the Traffic - Page 7
August 23, 2001
I've mentioned page popularity a few times, and you'll notice
that the first feature on the home page (after the banner and the
top-level topics listing) is the
Most Popular section.
It's fairly likely that a new visitor will find what they want in
this section. It's generated every night by a simple
Ruby script. I've found this page to be definitely one of the
most useful for tracking user interests, and determining where to
focus my efforts. This was an evolution of
WDVL's Top 100.
I tried a Bottom 100 too, to see which pages either needed
improvement, or increased visibility, or could be scrapped.
Eventually I decided to just let the script sort all visited
pages by popularity, rather than separating out top and bottom
100's or however many (except that it writes out a top 20 for
inclusion on the home page).
The script
also counts the unique users and page views, and determines the
relative popularity of the top-level categories. At the time of
writing, the order was
Gallery,
Puzzles,
Games,
Illusions,
Science,
Web design,
Space,
Humanities,
Life,
Arts,
Technology,
History, About
EncycloZine,
Library.
This might suggest that
Library could be a candidate for removal or merging into some
other topic(s). In fact, it was the last new topic created, by
moving some topics out from some other categories.
They seemed to fit
Library better. The home page also features an "In the
Spotlight" section, where new or updated articles can be
highlighted. Descriptive text appears for each article, giving
relief from the 'sea of links'.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Building a large content-rich Web site such as
The Web Developer's Virtual Library
or EncycloZine for a
world-wide audience comprising individuals with a wide range of
abilities, platforms, and viewing conditions, is a demanding task
requiring careful consideration of numerous aspects such as
information architecture, accessibility, usability, navigation,
presentation, and development and maintenance tools and
techniques. I humbly offer the following summary of my
conclusions and recommendations for other developers embarking on
similar projects:
- Select the most logical structure for your content, but allow
it to be flexible so that navigation pathways to popular areas
can be shortened.
- Supplement navigation hierarchies with cross-links between
related topics.
- Choose navigation labels with careful consideration of
possible ambiguities or uncertainties of meaning, especially if
you expect a diverse audience.
- Design the initial prototype without using navigation
graphics (e.g. imagemeaps). Focus instead on mapping your site
structure to text links, which are far easier to change.
- Incorporate those text links as
alt attributes
if/when you add graphics and other multimedia, and test with a
text-mode browser.
- Beware of imagining your users to be clones of yourself,
using similar browsers and viewing platforms. Consider that they
might be blind or vision impaired. Again, using a text-mode
browser can help.
- Put content before other stuff (such as ads and menus) on the
page. This benefits users with assistive technologies, and
improves your search engine placement.
- Please, please, please use relative font sizes rather than
fixed sizes. Some of us like the text to be a little larger, for
readability.
- A Most Popular
page can help you determine where to focus effort, and can be a
useful navigation aid for your visitors.
- Supplement hyperlink navigation with a search engine.
Content First - Page 6
Design and Architecture of a Content-Rich Web Site
Recommended Sites - Page 8
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