How to Create SCREAMing Web Sites

By Timothy Fish

02/04/2005

It has been four long weeks, but the web site is finally done. The graphics are perfect, the links are all connected and it is the finest work of art that man has ever created. You lean back and just wait for the hit count to start climbing. You look at the clock and realize that it is a couple of hours before bed time and you have nothing left to do. It is a nice feeling to know that the long nights and early mornings to get the web site done are over. You lean back and start dreaming about the time you have to do other things and then the phone rings.

“I know I asked you to put the picture of the North side of the building on the web site, but could you put the one of the South side on it instead?” the voice asks over the phone.

“Sure,” you reply, “it want take very long.”

“O, and one of the dates is wrong on the calendar.”

“Ok, I’ll take care of it.”

“And can you add....”

It has been said that a web site is never done. There is a great deal of truth to that. If a webmaster is not careful, he will be spending all of his time working on the web site. The purpose of this page is to help webmasters create good looking, usable web sites without giving up their own lives. If a webmaster will try to design a SCREAMing web site from the beginning he can avoid some of the problems that will come later.

What is a SCREAMing Web Site

SCREAM is an acronym for Supportability, Complexity, Reliability, Ease of Use, Appearance and Maintainability. Optimizing these factors can go a long way toward helping the webmaster maintain his sanity. Most new webmasters focus entirely on Appearance if they consider any of these factors. All of these factors will eventually come into play, but for many people it is too late to do anything about them by the time they realize they have a problem. A SCREAMing Web Site is one that considers these factors at each step of the way.

Supportability

Supportability is the ability to support the web site. Things that must be considered are the ability of the hardware devices to handle the traffic, the cost of hosting the site, the personnel required to do things such as add user ids, etc. If the website is hosted by a hosting company, you usually have the option of paying more for more bandwidth and more hard drive space. If the site is making a profit, it is probably best buy as much bandwidth and space as what you need. If the site does not pay for itself, you may want to try to keep the site traffic below a certain level, so that you do not need to pay more. The best way to do this is to be very specific in defining you audience and not including anything that is not needed by that audience. You may even consider reducing the size of you audience. If you are trying to attract people in a certain town you should probably not offer free software on you website, since that will attract people from many different places. You can also reduce the amount of graphics you use if the amount of data flow is a probably.

If certain functions of you website involves human intervention, you might want consider ways to reduce the trigger events for that human intervention. For example, if you have certain areas that require a user id and password be manually created by a human, you might require that anyone who needs a user id and password ask you in person. Allowing people to ask via a form or by e-mail could cause you to be flooded with requests, if you have a wide audience.

Complexity

Complexity how difficult it is to implement the web site. Complexity may be increased by the amount of coding that is involved, the structure of the web site or the number of pages that must be generated to implement the website. Complexity is often a trade-off with some of the other factors. Adding code that makes it easier to maintain the site increase the complexity of site. Using Cascading Style Sheets can be used to improve appearance and maintainability, but they can also increase the complexity of the site. Using dynamically generated pages rather than straight HTML can be very helpful, but once again the complexity may increase. Complexity is often the limiting factor when designing a web site. Each site development project has a limit to the amount of complexity it can handle. For large projects with several team members the complexity of the site can be a lot greater than can normally be handled by even a master web programmer working alone. As you consider the things you would like to include in your web site, be cognizant of your abilities and those of the other people involved. If you are considering adding a database to your web site and you have never done any database programming it will be a lot harder for you than for someone who has experience working with databases. Your life will be a whole lot less stressful if you do not include too many things that you know nothing about.

Reliability

Reliability has more meaning when applied to hardware than what it does to software. The reliability of the web server is an important factor, but as the web site designer you may not be able to do anything about that. When applied to software, reliability generally refers to how often a user sees a defect. For web sites a defect might be a mistake a programmer made in the code or it might be a link to another website that is no longer valid or it might be something else. A site that is used primarily for information that has several bad links might still be considered reliable since the user seldom follows the links. A site that is directory of web sites with several bad links would be considered unreliable since the user expects the links to be up to date. Reliability can be improved by limiting links to other sites, so that other webmasters cannot cause you problems and by frequent testing. If you are using frequent testing to test links to other sites it is best to have the testing automated so that you receive a report of the bad links without having to go through each page of your site and click on every link.

Ease of Use

Think about how your visitors will use your site. What information do they want? What do they want to do? What can you do to get them to where they want to be the quickest? Most users prefer to have one page that shows then the information available and can be scanned rather than having several layers of menus that must be traversed. What ever method you use, it should be familiar to the user. When designing the navigation system for your web site, use something that is similar to other web sites that you have seen. Buttons and menus usually work better on the left and on the top rather than at the bottom or on the right side. You can provide links within the body of a body, but if they link to things on your site you should include links in the navigation system as well.

Be sure to incorporate visual feedback in you site. If you use buttons you should change the color either on mouse down or on mouse over to let the user know which button he is clicking. If you use a form on you site, you should display a different page or a different wording to show that the form has been processed. If the user sees the exact same page as the form, he will easily forget that he has submitted the form and may submit it more than once.

Be consistent throughout the site. If you use buttons on the left side of one page, you should use buttons on the left side of the other pages as well. The user should be able to know where the buttons are without thinking about it very much. The one exception to the consistency rule is that the first page of your site may look slightly different, but you should use the same design elements, button style, etc. to let the user know that the button lead to the same thing as those on the other pages.

Appearance

The appearance and content of the website are extremely important. Without them there would be no reason to consider any of the other issues. When considering the appearance of the website, think about the feeling you want to present to the visitor. Is the site meant to be fun or is it more informative? What is the topic? What images and colors come to mind when you think about the subject the site is supposed to cover? If a site is about children, bold primary colors are often used. If the site is used to display a bunch of articles, such as this site, it is probably best to use a white or very light colored background with black or very dark text. Be sure to choose colors that work well together. You normally want to use enough contrast to be able to distinguish the colors from one another, but you want to avoid colors that clash.

Once you have chosen your color scheme, be consistent throughout the site. Changing color schemes from one page to the next can make it hard to tie the pieces of information together. In some cases you might want to change some of the colors to distinguish two or more things, but you should do this in a similar way to the way you would outline a story. For example, you might have four different groups in your organization that have a similar function, but you want to have some web pages dedicated to the activities of each group. You can use color as a visual cue to indicate which group is being discussed. Suppose the colors of the site are brown for the buttons, dark brown for the text and a light brown background. For the pages dedicated to these groups you would use the same colors, but you might include a horizontal bar across the top of the page that is red for group 1, yellow for group 2, green for group 3 and blue for group 4. If these groups are each broken in to two groups, you could use a dark and light color to further distinguish the groups.

One of the mistakes that some people make is adding toys to the website without considering what it does to the overall appearance. If the desired appearance is a refined look, you should not add a moving mailbox gif or a page hit counter. Scrolling text should only be used if you have a lot of information that you want to display in a small amount of space. It should never be used for very important information and should be slowed down enough to let the visitor read it without having to watch it run through several times. If you must use scrolling text be sure to allow the user to stop the text by moving the mouse over it.

For simple moving images gifs work very well, but images that have several colors do not work well in the gif format. For high quality moving image Flash media is very helpful. This will add complexity to your website, but the improvement in appearance is often worth it.

Maintainability

Once the fun of creating the website is over the webmaster’s job is to maintain the website. Maintenance is more than just keeping the website in working order. Many websites have dated material that must be removed and new material must be put into place. Many websites have a calendar of events that is two or three years old. When the website was new it was fun to keep the calendar up to date, but after a few months it was fun anymore it became work instead. Audio files are often easy to create, but it uploading them to the website requires editing HTML pages it becomes work. Adding new material is also easier at first, but often it requires editing multiple files. While editing one file is easy, two files can become work and three or more will probably not get edited.

It adds complexity to the website, but making the website dynamic instead of static can solve some of the problems of maintainability. If the calendar is stored in a database and a form is used to modify the calendar from the website it is easier to maintain and it is possible to have the out of date information disappear from the calendar automatically. A form with code behind it can be used to upload and delete audio files as well. While uploading audio files by hand can take some thought and time, using a form that does it for you will reduce the time and it take very little thought. The difference in time and effort can improve the chances that the effort will be continued and it allows more than one person to take on the task. Articles can also be stored in a database. A form can be used to enter the article and the article can be referenced by id. Once the article is in place, it can be accessed from a page that lists articles that meet certain criteria or the URL of the article can be placed as a link on another page.

If creating a dynamic website is beyond what the people working on the project feel comfortable with or if doing so would exceed the project budget, it is probably better to eliminate the calendar and any dated material from the site. This includes articles that show current events. An article about a party that happened more than a year ago without similar events after it makes the website look like it is not being maintained.

Conclusion

Paying attention to all of these factors can reduce the effort required by the webmaster later in the process. It is much easier to take care of these problems before you start writing code than what it is once the code has been implemented. It never hurts to take time out to consider what will happen next.

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