Poor Richard 7
#007/08-May-98
POOR RICHARD'S WEB SITE NEWS
Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site
Editor: Peter Kent
Top Floor Publishing
IN THIS ISSUE
- Beginner's Column: Why and How to Remove Animation from GIF Animations
- Adding a Search Engine: Good Idea or Not?
- Free Shopping-Cart Service
- Forwarding This Newsletter to Discussion Groups
- The =20 E-mail Problem
- Poor Richard's Web Site in the Press
- Reading Back Issues
- In the Next Issue
**** IF YOU LIKE THIS NEWSLETTER ... FORWARD IT TO FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES ****
Beginner's Column: Why and How to Remove Animation from GIF Animations
GIF animations are those little flickering pictures you see on many Web pages. This graphic format provides one of the cheapest and easiest ways to add motion to a Web page. But there are some good reasons you may want to stop the motion.
GIF means Graphic Interchange Format, and you may hear it referred to as CompuServe GIF now and then because it was originally used for the transfer of images across the CompuServe online service.
When Web browsers first began displaying images, there were two formats that could be used in Web pages: GIF and XBM (XBM is a UNIX format that has now pretty much disappeared from the Internet). There are other image types that browsers can display now, but GIF images remain very common on the Web.
Now, how can you animate a GIF? Take several GIF images, slap them together into a single .GIF file, add some instructions to the browser telling it how long to display each image, and in what sequence to display them, and you've got an animation. The browser displays one image, then the next, then the next, replacing one with the other to give the impression of motion.
To "slap" these things together you need a special program, but such programs are not uncommon, and they're fairly simple to use. Microsoft even gives one away with FrontPage (Microsoft GIF Animator), and others are available at the major shareware libraries on the Internet.
There are a couple of problems with GIF animations, though. First, because they're not true animations -- they're layers of individual images -- they can be quite large. And they can be very irritating, too. So irritating, that some Web-site testers have found that animations can actually make a Web page difficult to read, and sometimes even make readers leave a page. (I'm going to talk about the results of Web-site testing later in this newsletter, and in a later issue, too -- some of these results are quite surprising.)
As I discussed in issue 5 of this newsletter, I've recently won a number of awards for my Web site (I explained in that issue how to go about registering with hundreds of award programs very quickly see http:// http://www.poorrichard.com/freeinfo/special_reports.htm for more information). Some of the award images given to me when I won an award were GIF animations, though. The page on which I was placing these images was getting too large, I felt, and all the flickering was really quite irritating.
So I stopped the animations, which is quite simple to do. Start by opening the GIF file in a GIF animation program. Then you have two choices. You can do what I did; I removed all the layers in a file except one, the one I wanted to display in my page. I then saved the file. Now I have a GIF animation file, with only one layer. It's much smaller, and it doesn't move. (I'm sure some programs will allow you to save the file as a normal GIF file, which will save just a little more space by removing the animation instructions, too.)
The other thing you can do is to turn the animation off, but keep all the layers. You do this simply by changing the instructions, so that only one of the layers is displayed. Or perhaps you may want to change the instructions so that the picture runs through the sequence just once, but doesn't repeat ... or maybe you want to slow the animation way down, to make the flickering less irritating. Whatever you do, you've modified the way in which the image is displayed, but it will remain the same size -- you haven't removed layers, so you won't have a smaller image.
These programs don't take long to learn. And don't be put off by this talk of "instructions." A program may display an image, and have information displayed in text boxes next to the image. You can simply change numbers, or clear checkboxes, to change the manner in which the animation runs.
Adding a Search Engine: Good Idea or Not?
A little while ago a subscriber to this newsletter sent me email suggesting that I added a search function to my Web site; it would make the information at the site easier to find, he said.
I thought that was a pretty good idea, and added it to my To Do list. (Not right at the top, somewhere in the middle, but the middle keeps moving down. ...) But then I read something that made me think twice about adding a search engine.
I spoke at WebDesign98 in Denver, a conference on ... well, you know. Anyway, another speaker at that conference was talking about Web site usability. Jared Spool is the "Principal Investigator" at a company called User Interface Engineering, and has done a lot of Web-site testing. His company uses average Web "surfers," shows them a Web site, and gives them instructions -- tells them what they should achieve at the site, or what information they should retrieve -- then watches what happens. (By the way, the title of his presentation was "Cool Doesn't Cut It," a concept I completely agree with and which I wrote about in Poor Richard's Web Site.) Now, I was looking through his session handout and his book, "Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide," when I ran across information about search systems at Web sites. Spool claims that search engines can often slow down retrieval of information. The problem generally lies in the design of the search engine, and, to a lesser degree perhaps, the fact that few people know how to use them properly.
These search engines are all too often pretty dumb. They're based on key words; if they find the word you entered in a document, that document ends up on the list, even though it may not be of interest to you. So if you are searching for "plane," the search engine will find documents about aviation and documents about woodworking. Search engines often return unintelligible information, too; filenames in some cases, which is completely useless, or perhaps ambiguous titles (a good reason to make sure page titles make sense).
Anyway, Spool found that not only were search engines at a Web site not particularly helpful, they even had the opposite effect, making it harder for people to find the information they needed. About one third of the subjects would use the search engine immediately, before they'd even tried browsing their way down links. To me this means that a bad search engine is worse than none at all, because it will lead a significant number of people astray.
The real answer to helping people find their way around your site is to step back a little and look at the site from the visitor's perspective. Think about the way the information has been organized, and whether a visitor can reasonably find the information by following through a logical sequence of links. you may also want to consider including an index, which is easier to use than a search engine and, if it's a good one, should work better because an index can provide contextual information (you can say, for instance, "plane, woodworking" or "plane, aviation").
I plan to redesign my site a little soon (it's in the middle of my To Do list). I may include a search engine -- I haven't completely ruled it out. But I'll probably add an index first. And if I do add a search engine, I'll make sure I find one that works properly, providing useful information, and I'll position it and include instructions in such a manner that it's used as a last resort, not a first.
By the way, if you'd like to learn more about this useful book, "Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide," (I'll be talking about it again, no doubt), visit this site: http://www.uie.com/
Free Shopping-Cart Service
I don't want to scare anyone off this subject -- I've written so much about shopping-cart services and software recently that some of you are probably sick of it. But I just had to mention this ... iCat is offering a free shopping-cart service to small businesses. If you sell 10 or fewer products they'll host a shopping-cart for you. Of course they're hoping that your business will grow and you'll trade up to a bigger and better shopping-cart system, at which point they'll start charging you.
For new subscribers to this newsletter ... what's a shopping- cart service? It's a service that hosts a shopping-cart system for you -- the forms and programs needed for visitors to your Web site to place orders with you. The programs run on the service's Web server, not yours, so even if you have your Web site hosted by a service that won't let you run programs, you can still have a shopping-cart system. For instance, even if you have a personal Web site at AOL or CompuServe, you can still have a shopping-cart.
This sounds like a great deal. I haven't looked closely, but iCat should know how to run such a service; they sell very expensive shopping-cart software ($4,000 to $10,000). for more information visit this site:
Again, for new subscribers ... I have a free directory of shopping-cart services and programs at my Web site. It includes almost 70 entries now, as I've added this new iCat service and several others recently. You can find it at:
http:// http://www.poorrichard.com/freeinfo/special_reports.htm
Forwarding This Newsletter to Discussion Groups
Now and then a recipient of this newsletter asks if he can forward it or use it in some way. Feel free to forward the newsletter, or any portion, to whatever newsgroup, mailing list, or online-service forum you wish ... however you must include the copyright and newsletter-subscription information that you'll find at the bottom of the newsletter.
If you want to use the newsletter in some other way -- such as posting it at a Web site or including a portion in a printed document, please contact me: pkent@topfloor.com
The =20 E-mail Problem
Many of you who received a copy of the previous issue of this newsletter will have noticed something a little strange. The newsletter was littered with =20=20. Not everyone saw this -- I'll explain why in a moment. I'm not sure how many did; at least 11%, because that's how many subscribers have AOL accounts, but probably others were effected too.
I'll explain what I've learned so far about this problem, because it's something that can effect us all -- this problem can appear in any e-mail message, so if you're planning to publish your own e-mail newsletter, or even send out an e-mail press release, it's worth being aware of this. I don't yet fully understand what's going on, but I know enough now to be able to avoid the problem.
Here's what happened. When I sent out the last edition of the newsletter, the mail server -- the program that took the message from my mail program and sent it out onto the Internet -- converted its format. This was apparent from the message header, which contained these lines:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to
8bit by bigbiz.com id UAA26184As you can see he message was "autoconverted" to something called 8-bit format. Now I'm not completely sure why the message was converted. There's something in the message, some character or code that the mail server found in it, that won't transmit in normal plain text, so it changed the message. I haven't been able to figure out which character. I even ran a special DOS utility (dofilter) that I found at a shareware site to look for "high ASCII" characters to see if that was the problem, but the program was unable to find any.
Anyway, for whatever reason the message was converted. Almost certainly there was some kind of special character in the file that shouldn't have been there, probably a typesetting character such as an em dash or a curly quote, entered by my word processing program. Still, that shouldn't really be a problem. Most mail servers these days can handle 8-bit messages, so most recipients of the message would have noticed nothing unusual. But some mail servers evidently don't handle 8-bit messages properly, notably AOL's server. And so they do strange things.
Now, =20 is the hexadecimal code for a space. While most of use have to learn to work with plain old base 10, decimal -- numbers 0 to 10 -- programmers get to work with other number systems, such as binary (base 2), octal (base 8), and hexadecimal (base 16). For some reason some mail servers, when they receive an 8-bit message get a little confused, and display the hexadecimal code for a space in some cases. Not every space was replaced by =20, luckily; they were replaced only if there were no other characters to the right of them except another space or a carriage return. So if a space was followed by a word, it was okay, but if a space was followed by another space and then a carriage return (that is, a break to a new line), or if a space was followed immediately by a carriage return, it became =20.
How can I -- and you, if you're publishing via e-mail -- avoid this problem? There are a few things that can be done.
First, I could write the message in a text editor rather than a word processor to make sure I don't get any weird characters in it. I could, but I won't, because I want to use the word processor's various tools (spell check, search and replace, and so on). Or maybe I'll start writing the message in a text editor, and then copying it into a word processor for final clean-up. Anyway, I always search for these special "typesetting" characters before I send the message out:
ellipsis ^0133
single curly quote, right ^0145
single curly quote, left ^0146
double curly quote, right ^0147
double curly quote, left ^0148
en dash ^0150
em dash ^0151I guess I need to be a little more careful in looking for these special characters; one probably got through in the last issue.
I'll also mail the message to myself as a test, before sending it out, to see if it is converted to 8-bit (I'll simply look in the Content-Transfer-Encoding line to see if it says 8bit or 7bit.) If it is, I'll find the bad character. I'll send the message in two parts, and see which half is converted to 8bit; then split that half in two and see which is converted, and so on until I find the bad character. (Unfortunately I didn't think of doing this to the last issue, until I'd fooled around with it so much that it no longer had the problem; I somehow removed the bad character without even realizing it.) If I'm in a really obsessive mood, I'll send the message to a fake AOL account (834082oaieurh@aol.com, for instance), to see what the message looks like when it bounces back to me. If any problems have slipped through, I should be able to see them in the error message sent back to me by the AOL mail program. (But as long as it's a 7bit message, there really shouldn't be any problem.)
By the way, this is the first issue of this newsletter sent out by my new mailing list service, Lyris. Until recently I'd been sending it out from my e-mail program, but the subscriber list is growing too fast, and becoming a real hassle. I'll explain what Lyris can do in a future issue.
Poor Richard's Web Site in the Press
More reviews of "Poor Richard's Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site" have turned up recently:
- What a fantastic review! David Garvey, writing in The New England Nonprofit Quarterly, wrote a review that was published under the title "Buy This Book!" He said, "Poor Richard's Web Site won my vote for the most helpful book in Web site management and design ... you will find this book highly valuable. The lessons of just the first three chapters, alone, saved us thousands of dollars and many hours of work." Thanks, David!
- Publishing for Entrepreneurs wrote a short review saying that "Kent proves that a computer book can explain technology, can be well-written and can hold a reader's attention for longer than it takes to download your home page ... 'Make haste, not waste,' to Kent's Web site, to find out more about this timely and welcome addition to any independent publisher's bookshelf."
- Kimberly Warzelhan, who calls herself The Frogfrau, is a Web-design consultant, who gives awards to Web sites that she likes. Here's a little bit of her review: "If you want to build a low cost website, here is the place for you! This site has info on everything you need to do a great, yet inexpensive site. ... The Frogfrau *DEFINITELY* recommends this one to anyone who will be building a web site in the near future, ok, this is not doing a LOT for my business, but....no joke, you have to see this site."
For more reviews, and many readers' testimonials, visit ...
Poor Richard's Web Site is in many bookstores, and can be ordered by others; it can also be ordered online, through the mail, by fax, or by phone.
See ...
http://www.poorrichard.com/order/
Order direct from the publisher, and you'll get a 100%, 1-Year Guarantee. If the book doesn't help you set up a low-cost yet effective Web site, send it back for a refund!
Some Thoughts on Search Engine Optimization
You've probably heard about search-engine optimization services. These services say they can put your Web site in the major search engines near the top of the relevant category, boosting traffic to your site. Unfortunately a lot of the claims are hype. Here are a few of my thoughts on this subject.
The first thing to consider is that these services cannot boost your rating in the most important search site of all, Yahoo. More searches are done at this site than at any other; according to at least one survey more than at all the other search sites combined. They can't fool Yahoo, though, because search engine optimization relies on tricking a computer program -- some kind of search-engine "bot" that looks at your Web site -- into giving you a high rating. But Yahoo uses real live people to rate your site; if they like it, they'll add it, if they don't, they won't. And in any case, you'll just be added to a list in alphabetical order, (and although you can try using an A word in your page title, to get near the top, Yahoo's people may not use your page title to enter you into the list.
Also, the search-engine optimization services may not really be as successful as they claim. Did-it.com, one of the better- known services, told me that on average they were sending around 800 people a month to their customers, hardly a deluge (some days my Web site gets that many or more).
And the whole concept of promising large numbers of people that you'll push them to the top of their categories strikes me as a little funny; we can't all be at the top, can we? And even if you can find a way to trick a search engine into doing what you want it to do today ... the search engine may change how it works tomorrow. They're constantly trying to keep ahead of the optimization people; it's a sort of battle of wits, each side looking for the other's weaknesses.
You can spend an awful lot of time and energy -- and money -- trying to optimize for search engines, but you'll never be finished, because you'll constantly have to keep up with what the search engines are doing. In fact search-engine optimization can sometimes have the opposite effect. If you're too aggressive it can get you banned from a search engine.
There are some simple things you can do, and should do. Make sure you have a descriptive title tag in your Web pages, including the sort of key words people are likely to use when searching for sites of your type. Use the META keywords and description tags. Make sure the main page at your site includes text that contains the keywords that search engines are likely to look for.
But here's the most important secret for search-engine optimization, or at least for drawing people to your site, a secret you don't often hear when people discuss this subject. Make sure your site is worth visiting. Consider why somebody would want to visit your site, and ask yourself a simple question: if it wasn't' my site, would I want to visit it? If you create a really useful site, and register with the major search engines, it will probably get listed. And eventually the word will get around, and people _will_ visit.
A final thought. If you think getting your Web site listed in the search engines is all you need to do to bring people to your site, you've got a problem. That may have been the case a couple of years ago, but today there's too much stuff out there. Unless you're really active in getting the word out about your site, people are not going to visit, regardless of how well "search-optimized" your site is. (What other methods are their to get the word out? I'll consider that in the next issue.)
Reading Back Issues
If you need to refer to back issues of this newsletter, you can find then at the following location:
http://www.poorrichard.com/newsltr/
In the Next Issue ...
- Getting the Word Out about your Web site.
- Setting up an e-mail mailing list for newsletters, bulletins, product announcements, etc.
- The RecommendIt service -- encouraging visitors to recommend your site to friends.
- Business-card Web sites.
