Experts tell you how to design Useful Websites

Author: Steve outing

What's wrong with your website? There may be many.

Despite the network fever in the past few years, and the growth of online media, there are still many people in this industry to learn, and it is still a period of time.

For this reason, I have looked at news websites and found a lot of room for improvement and experimentation. Some online content quality experts, online application experts, and online writing masters share the same view. I recently asked several of them how to improve their news websites, that is, how to serve customers and grow into an independent enterprise.

The following are some ideas they think are the best. They may be helpful to your website, or let you know that the problems can be improved first. Some of my opinions are also incorporated.

Leave it alone

Information constructors and network application expert Keith Instone suggested: "Don't worry about your homepage for one week 」. Why? Because the home page allows the website to focus on editing, the "inner page" is ignored. Instone says that it takes a week to focus on the bottom-Layer Web page, which will certainly benefit a lot and further analyze the improvements in those areas.

Instone said: "Each page Of These webpages is not that important, but when we add them together, the gains will be even greater .」

Especially in the design of the guidance, we can see how the internal pages Guide Reading and turning pages. This may be the space for editing and marketing personnel to work together to improve and guide readers correctly, after leaving the webpage, you can still switch to another page of the website.

Remove dead wood

Instone another statement: Remember to remove some things when you design your website again. As the website continues to add new tricks, the results become Increasingly fat. In fact, you can easily find out less attractive content from the records accessed by the web page, and then remove it. Instone said: "I bet on the old version of this new website .」

The website will keep adding new tricks, so at the very least, every time you join a new project, you need to remove some things. If you don't do this, your website will become fat, readers cannot select the key item when surfing the Internet.

This phenomenon is particularly evident on the homepage. Many news websites have hundreds of connections on the homepage. Many network application experts say this is too overloaded (just give a few examples: the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and other websites ). The fat homepage is indeed common in news websites.

This is not to say that we must imitate a simple Google homepage, but news websites can withstand a "diet 」.

Compared with the main news websites, I found that msnbc.com is not so scary. You may argue that msnbc-com is a response to its parent TV, and the newspaper website is a response to its parent newspaper, but look at BBC News, although the mother belongs to a broadcasting institution, the website is still obese.

They want to connect immediately

Reconsider other people's connection methods. There are more and more links, not in text, but in the lower-right corner of another box or column (for example, this is what the New York Times did, link all the links in the article to the document.) The problem is that this will cause obstacles to the readers. The readers must jump to the column to retrieve the information. (For example, if the author of a document talks about a website and you want to go in, but you cannot directly click in the position of the document. Instead, you have to do more procedures before you can get in .)

Lisa price, an online writing expert and author of hot TEX: Web writing that works, has called "respect for the link function" to allow people to jump into unnecessary circles, that is, they do not respect the value of links. She said that links add value to your content, so links are also your content. Instead of considering connections as competitors, they should be seen as a helper to increase quality. Price also suggests that if the document is linked to the database, you should temporarily open the database to allow readers to link, even if the database is charged at ordinary times, then it should be free of charge.

Many websites link personal names to their addresses. For example, the name of a reporter in a report may be mailto: to his address, which is very common on the news site. But Jakob Nielsen, a well-known network application expert, said that this is a bad example in terms of website applications. "The Reader expects to obtain information by clicking the mouse," he said .」 Linking a mail address with a name only adds confusion to the reader. The link to the author's name should be the author's autobiography or relevant materials, such as other works of the author.

Place data and statistics

Newspaper websites use a large number of texts instead of pictures to follow the example of the parent media. Yvette Nielsen, an Australian website consultant and media worker trainer, said this is not a mistake, but it is necessary to recognize the differences between reading on paper and reading on the Internet.

She suggested that you extract the data and statistics in the document. It is particularly difficult to read computer images because of rigid data and numbers. It is best to use visual charts for presentation, this kind of work online is more than printing. Picture Display is of course important in printing and publishing, but online publishing is more important.

Another suggestion of Yvette Nielsen is to add a summary before each document (of course, important documents, not text articles), which is a common deficiency of news websites. Nielsen said that the abstract is necessary because it can attract the attention of readers and may be used to read the full text. Online readers are quick to take action and try to grasp their hearts.

Less is more

This is the last and most interesting piece of advice, from webword.com to all of John Rhodes. He said, check your website to see if there is anything too dazzling and eye-catching, but possibly harassing readers. He suggested looking for some people to visit your website, find out any areas where they feel harassment, and return to you. They can first write the location where the harassment is, and then rate the level of harassment.

In this way, you may find negative items on the website and the items to be removed, at least to improve the harassment of readers. He said that many websites need to be simplified to remove disturbing content.

Repeat the same mistakes of news websites

News sites repeat mistakes of the past

Since, I have been a member of online news, and I have also reported online news trends. When I joined this line, I am excited and I am also in mourning.

Over the years, we have learned a lot in this industry. We have tried different operating models by experiment, experiment, and experiment. During my years as a fan of dot-com, I met many smart and ambitious people who worked hard to create a new type of economic mass communication.

Many of these people still make the same mistakes before and ignore the most obvious mistakes. Although the network has become popular, we are still struggling.

Record our mistakes

I attended several online news conferences and similar activities this year. What shocked me was that we still made the same mistake in this industry, this makes it more difficult to construct a new media that can compete with newspapers, magazines, television, and broadcast.

I have participated in two important online news events in recent months. The speakers, scholars, and attendees of these two events share the same view: in the press, there are too few people who truly recognize the value of interaction and can create online services.

Let me be more specific:

The first mistake we made: we still don't know this online media, and we still published it according to the old rules, one-way dissemination of the information we think the masses need. Most of us still preach to the online audience without talking to them.

Of course, most news websites have discussion forums. The electronic address of reporters is published to encourage readers to respond. Each report can also provide comments to readers. This is the interaction that took several years. Although it is good, it is not enough.

The online news directors should take a deeper look at how other online communities work. This is not hard to find. Check whether slashdot.org or the newly created kuro5hin is dominated by readers. Kuro5hin is designed for balanced reporting by news agencies. Readers gather together to choose news topics, and then comment and debate, as if to integrate the debate community into news organizations.

Rusty Foster, founder of kuro5hin, said at the University of Southern California online news conference: "traditional media needs this .」 He invites readers to join online communities and uses online tools to construct and maintain online communities in various fields.

My favorite Foster is the online community around reporters and writers, which allows journalists to come out of the email and discussion area and encourages them to build communities using software tools. They themselves are the core, and readers, critics, and supporters surround them to respond, suggest, criticize, and even correct news personnel at the core.

It is important to construct such an interactive community on the Internet. It is impossible to change to another place. This is a unique experience of online media. No other media allows news consumers to have such experience.

The second mistake: most news websites are passive, just like traditional media, waiting for readers to read, listen, or read.

To make the online media stand out, let the Internet users "do", not just "read" some materials. Nora Paul, director of the New Media Research Institute, advocates that people who enter the website participate in the "activity 」. (In an online news conference, she severely criticized the current news website for being "too boring 」.)

I think this is the core of today's online news. The content we make now is read, not interactive. Paul's organization is developing a new digital "Story-telling" approach, which brings together journalists and online game designers to bring together journalists and artists, create a new way of communication.

To succeed in online news, you need more adventures to try new ways of display. You need more "Things to do" instead of "readable materials 」, this kind of online news is new, not to change the traditional content to another media.

Is there something wrong with online news? I think so. You can learn from the media development history. At the beginning of TV, TV was a "picture radio". The camera only shot the reading paper. After gradually maturing, TV found its own way. The network is in the same transitional period. Now we are developing our own storytelling method. At this time, the rules of traditional media are still strong.

Yes, there are some news that only appear online, SND. IES announced at the beginning of this year that it had to select excellent multimedia websites each month for awards, but few people participated in the first few months, indicating that there were still not many media outlets for such content.

What should a news website look like? This interaction is like an electric game, and there is no other media for this content. For example, some people propose to increase the real estate tax and create a trial computer on the Internet, so that online users can input their own house prices to see how much tax is added. In addition, for online recipes, It is very helpful for housewives to enter the number of people who eat meals, and the components of various materials are automatically calculated and adjusted.

The third mistake: we have been ignoring the network trend for too long. Taking weblog as an online note for acquaintances, the trend is extremely obvious, and the number has reached hundreds of thousands. However, there are also some in major news organizations, not paid much attention.

Why is a blog important to news organizations? This is the voice of the masses. For example, the observer-reporter recently created a public blog on the website called off the record. Anyone can raise an online topic and post it for editing review. For many people, this is the opportunity for their names to appear in the observer-reporter.

I think that blogs are not valued by the press because they threaten the press, because blogs encourage everyone to participate and make comments. Editing is not as rigorous as traditional news.

However, the "local" projects of blogs and other networks should be embraced by news organizations. They represent another type of communication, and news websites can be used for unique performance.

When the press makes online readers feel their unique experiences, the financial dilemmas may disappear, and online news will naturally grow.