What we do
- provide wiki based websites for community group, personal, and small business use.
- support community groups with our offer to set up their websites on WCN for free, and provide full documentation for feeding and watering the website.
- provide ongoing maintenance, eg maintaining the current version of the wiki software and recipes, if needed, at very reasonable rates, but its just as easy to do it yourself.
- can help you set up your own home network based intranet. A wiki is the ideal flexible solution for your intranet.
What is important
Your website is about
- usability: content and navigation.
and
Content
Content is what brings visitors to your site, keeps them on your site, and brings them back to your site.
Content is value.
Content needs to be current, well written, and with a navigational structure or network.
Navigation
Navigation is how people use your site.
Visitors to your site want to be able to find what they need quickly and easily.
To find information, it must be present - see content above, and ideally located obviously and with a minimum of clicking and page refreshes.
This is where a wiki comes into its own.
As well as a mandatory search function, any or all of an index, site map, categories (or tags), menus such as a sidebar, topbar, or similar, assist in finding out what is available and where,
hyperlinks provide a network of cross references to enable people browsing to follow their own interests.
Participation Inequality
(approve sites) Encouraging more users to contribute
Utility
Can your visitors (customers, users)
- find the information they want? (see navigation)
- contact you
- purchase or pay for your product or service (if applicable)
- obtain value from your website
Do your visitors (customers, users)
- have a reason to return to (revisit) your site?
- have the opportunity to link to it
- have a reason to recommend it to others?
Layout and structure
A familiar paradigm for your website will assist your visitors to find the information, products, and services they want, from you.
A good starting point in the following, which can be varied as required.
|
Logo
| Title
|
| Header menu
|
| Side
bar
| Body of page
Website content
|
| Footer
|
The logo shows your branding, and facilitates navigation to the home page.
The title can be your full company name, club name, or website name, with additional branding, slogans, etc.
The header menu, if used, is conventionally along the lines of
Home Products Services Location Contact About Search.
The sidebar can be your primary navigation, or can be sub navigation within a subject from the header.
menu.
The footer can be used for additional links, perhaps (if not placed elsewhere)
Contact About Sitemap Index.
|
Logo
| Title
|
| Header menu
|
| Body of page
Website content
|
| Footer
|
Variations on structure can include
- sidebar on right
- sidebar or header menu only
- footer menu instead of sidebar or header menu
Practices to avoid
- floating menus that move to a fixed place in the view port
- drop down menus
- pages that require horizontal scrolling
- pages that require vertical scrolling
- wastage of screen space with large margins
Good practices
- flexible layout that caters for a variety of screen sizes and resolution
- print page contents, do not print menus, sidebars, and other 'website only' display or navigation information
- keep page size to that which requires no vertical scrolling on, say, a 1024 x 768 pixel screen
Security
- provide security to prevent spamming if write internet access is enabled
To come
- readers and writers
- standards
- accessibility
- usability
