culture.gov.au

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Guide 5. What will I do with my website?

Website planning (screen 4 of 9)

What information and services should you provide on your website?

Before you decide to put material on to a website, determine if it is appropriate for distribution over the Web. Some things might be better suited to an intranet or extranet(1).

For example, company policies, minutes of meetings, workplace agreements, staff notices and so on, are probably better suited to an intranet.

In Guide 4(2) you discovered how to decide which functions and services should be available on your website by analysing the activities of your organisation.

When you develop your website you should also bear in mind the increasing sophistication and functionality of the Web.

Design your website with expansion - called scalability - in mind. Realise that as your site evolves and matures, many more Web screens will be added to those you initially thought you needed.

To begin, map out your site structure on paper or on a spreadsheet, organising the top level directory and each sub-directory and the links you want between them. Try and keep your most important information as close to the top level of the site as possible. Try and maintain your site so that your user is no more than three mouse clicks away from any information.

Information and services for your users

You will probably want to provide the following information and services for your users on your website:

• A media area for media releases and other important documents which advertise your activities to your users.
• Guidelines and application forms, if you are in the business of providing grants or awards or running competitions.
• A program of your events, a calendar or event finder.
• Contact information including street and postal addresses, email addresses of appropriate staff for enquiries, telephone and fax numbers.
• Hours and days you are open for business.
• If you are a performance-based organisation you may wish to provide information about your performers and artists.
• If you are a collecting organisation, access to catalogues and/or collections.
• A 'search your site' function(3).
• Some general information about your organisation: where it is, what it does and how it does it.
• Links to related sites.
• A secure online facility to enable users to book or buy tickets, goods or services.
• An electronic newsletter to keep them in touch with your activities.
• A discussion list to keep users informed and to develop a sense of community.
• A URL minder service.
• A feedback mechanism for the site as a whole as well as for individual parts of the site.

You can also provide things to do on your website just for fun - a Pop Quiz(4), free chat room(5), game, or a puzzle.

Reading on, and writing for, the Web

You may want to provide the text of significant reports, surveys, essays, articles or commentary produced by members of your organisation.

Most people don't like reading large slabs of text on a Web screen. They want to find relevant information quickly and not have to read everything on the screen, or they want to be able to download the document for offline reading.

The equivalent of two or three A4 pages is about as long as one Web screen should be, or it should also be provided in a format which allows it to download quickly.

To help your users find the information they want, keep the following strategies in mind:

• Use descriptive subheadings
  In any Web document use descriptive subheadings which describe the content of the following paragraphs. This means that users can scan the subheadings and know when they've found the information they want.
   
• Front load: important information at the beginning
  When writing for the Web, front load. What that means is that all the most important information should be at the beginning of a paragraph, article or story and the information should become progressively less important as the user reads on.
   
• Provide links or the option to download long documents>
  If you have long documents put them in a format where they can be downloaded for reading later - either as a Word document, or a PDF (Portable Document File). If you have long documents on your website, make sure you provide a hypertext index and plenty of hyperlinks between pages. See the next screen(6) for more on managing long documents.
   

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References

1. Guide 2 screen 3 http://culture.gov.au/resources/guides/g2/s3.htm#intranet
2. Guide 4 screen 1 http://culture.gov.au/resources/guides/g4/s1.htm
3. Search services for your website http://culture.gov.au/freesearch/
4. Ecommerce Pop Quiz http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/customer_relations/article.php/10363_585011l
5. Free Chat room http://www.everywherechat.com/addachat.html
6. Guide 5 screen 5 http://culture.gov.au/resources/guides/g5/s5.htm

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