First written on Wednesday, April 2, 2003
Article first written for Goulash Magazine
Focus on content. We are changing the focus of our web pages to be more content centric. We used to focus on format a lot, spending a lot of time on colors and images. In the past we had some very attractive web pages with nice images, fancy colors, and other adornments. It seems though that this serves as a distraction for the main content of the article. So our recent efforts have been devoted to content and not on appearance. We think, at least to us, that web page content is the most important entity. It is the writing (content) that we are interested in.
We are changing the focus of our web pages. I recall some of the more interesting web pages that I have read have occurred when the background is white, the links are blue, and when there are no ads or other graphic adornments. I recall some moments of study and thought, as with academics. It seems that the ads, fancy images, color inverting buttons distract from the main purpose of the article, which is supposed to be an intellectual discourse between the author and the reader. Of course the “big” commercialism guys have all the glitzy colors, flashy ads, active buttons, beautiful rounded corners, (see MSNBC.com for example) and so it is difficult to bypass this implicit norm and to try to be more academic. Those gutsy academic guys, like the guys who write the gnu manuals and stuff, just boldly write on white with blue links. That takes guts! But the reading is great! No distractions, and pure thought.
And so we are also focusing more on content. Here are some more comments.
As we obtain more content it is possible at some future time that we may attempt to format the content more nicely. (Or we may try to get someone to do it for us.) An advantage with this also is that more standard word processors can be used so the focus can “just” be on the writing.
Use a word processor. An advantage of focusing on content is that you can use your favorite word processor and just “let the words” fly. This seems to be the most natural environment for writing. Word processors, at least good ones, make it easy to think and they worry about the details of the writing medium.
Free to think. We are also tired of fiddling with colors, backgrounds, and fancy adornments. We want to be more free to focus on content.
But I don't have a good word processor. There are many nice word processors that create excellent web pages, and that free you to focus on content. I think Word is pretty standard on Windows machines. Word saves nice HTML. Also Netscape's Composer editor is fantastic. It handles all sorts of fancy constructs, and we have used this very much. Sun's Star Office costs about as much as a Linux distribution, and you can run it on an old pc. Thus we are resorting back to the “good old” WYSIWYG days. (This FEREGO Magazine article discusses creating web pages.)1
Fonts (and Roman sarcasm). Which fonts look the nicest and make the reading experience the easiest. We have fiddled with this and have tried all sorts of combinations. We have quit this for a while, and we are going to go with the default font, which you can set yourself in your browser. For all the font fiddling we have done (“fontling” with type), we still seem to find that the old defaults still look the best. That old “New Times Roman”, implying the current very modern Roman age, is hard to beat, as were Roman numerals.
Format change reason number #12554. We skipped a number of reasons and got right to this one: Laziness. Yup. That's a very good (and believable) reason.
Search engines. Those little critters and crawlers (such as Alta Vista) will find you even if your background color is black, or pink, or purple, or anything. They are not smart enough to be able to search for images and other content, and still go by words. In other words, searches are based on word content on not on how glitzy your graphics is or how round your corners are.
Simplicity of conversion. If the content that you create is reasonably simple, then the “chances are good” that you will be able to read it in future years. If your web pages are relatively simple then maybe five years from now when word processors have improved a lot you can read that web page and change it into something fancier. The smaller the subset of HTML and graphics that one uses, the greater are the chances that other tools will be able to read it. Recall that this field is still changing very rapidly; so it makes sense to KISS (keep it simple S...).
Load time. Content that is heavily graphics, video, and sound laden takes a long time to download. Pure text without any graphics downloads fast. A lot of people will just leave if your page takes too long to download. Our new focus is on simple content. Our HTML uses mainly a few basic components: <p>'s, headings, italics, bold, and a few other things. We decided not to use tables, since they are complicated. This all adds up to fast downloads. These pages load quickly even over slow modems.
To experiment and learn. We are experimenting with doing less formatting to learn more about our own methods and to learn how other people respond. If we focus less on visual appearance, will it help us produce better writing? And how will it affect the popularity of our pages?
It would be interesting to see what psychology studies will say regarding which is more important: attractive artwork, flashy ads, etc. or high quality intellectual content. It seems to be our experience that the former distracts from the latter.
Copyright @2003 FEREGO. All rights reserved.
1FEREGO's Webmatic toolkit can be useful in creating web pages quickly. In the simplest sense “raw” writing can be done using Notepad and the Webmatic system can be programmed to automatically add all of the formatting. This way all you need to do is put a blank line where each new paragraph begins.