Comments on "Mission Control: Come in, Houston...."I hope you found Argus' critique interesting, useful, and thought-provoking. Some of their recommendations I agree with and have started to implement. Some I will need more time to think about. And a few I find debatable. I do not mean 'disagreeable' - as far as I'm concerned, if a user of WDVL has a suggestion, I must always listen to it and try to understand where they're coming from. But I also must weigh many, many factors, and sometimes I will just have to differ. There was one segment I found more debatable than the others, and so I chose to comment only on that one segment. Here we go... Defining the mission and metaphor of a web site is similarly important. Stars.com seems to have many of them. Nominally it is a virtual library for Web developers. But it is also a magazine, an encyclopedia, an annotated bibliography, a gallery of images, a software repository, a job bulletin board, and a way to search the entire Internet. Some of these functions are only marginally related to the mission of the site. [...] Focus on the most important content. It is unlikely that Stars.com can compete with the other job bulletin boards out there. Why not carve out a specific niche in the marketplace rather than trying to be all things to all people?What is our mission ? Perhaps it is most concisely encapsulated in the opening paragraph that we now have on the home page:
"A comprehensive illustrated encyclopedia of web technology, The WDVL
is a well-organised goldmine of tutorials, examples, and links to great
resources. It's for webmasters and Internet developers who are creating
web sites with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CGI, Java applets,
JavaScript, graphics, etc."
Perhaps that definition would, if strictly interpreted in a classical
sense, make some of our features 'marginal'; an encyclopedia such as
Brittanica would not normally function as a jobs board. However this is
the web and semantics must be re-evaluated. We were one of the very
first sites to offer such a service and it was very popular. It was
"the obvious thing to do" since web developers came to us, and many of
them also wanted jobs. Since then many other professionally-run boards
have been created and we piggybacked ours on the Library where it could
continue at virtually no cost to us. People still use it so I don't see
that it's really too marginal.
Also, users are left without an explanation of the Stars.com domain name and the space theme. There is no apparent reason--in the minds of users--to link this metaphor to a library on Web development. [...] Reevaluate the space metaphor. Make a direct connection in users' minds between the space theme and the content of the site. Or, focus future marketing efforts on the WDVL domain name, rather than Stars.com.True. We established our domain before the gold rush and had little idea what we were going to do with it; we've spent many years in the astronomy world and the domain name appealed to us for it's own sake. As history would have it, the WDVL had its roots in "The CyberWeb" (a clichéed name now but not 3 years ago..) and metamorphosed gradually into what it is now. Some 95% of our traffic goes to Stars.com and trying to shift it over to WDVL.com seem to be of marginal utility.. Many people know us as "Stars.com" (note that the critique itself persistently refers to us as "Stars.com" rather than "WDVL"). And if anyone hears about us but doesn't know our URL they'll probably try "wdvl.com" and find us anyway (this we know has happened). Delete extraneous content--or relegate it to a different site. Some features such as the gallery, or the search engine that searches the entire Internet are not directly related to the mission of this site.I don't find the features mentioned 'extraneous'. The Gallery was intentionally created to serve as a demonstration/showcase area for the web technologies that the site is about. We decided to let artistic creativity join in, as I've said elsewhere, creating web sites is more than just technology alone; or graphics alone; or management alone. The Gallery is an attempt to show the many facets of web development converging and producing results. The Search page has a bug in that the "Search Services (Public)" is supposed to mention "W3C" - i.e. it's a search engine for the W3C - very relevant for web developers! However, there is also a general search form there too, and yes, perhaps it's of marginal utility...
While not intended as a response to this critique,
Navigation Architecture of The WDVL
offers further insight into the architectural design decisions
influencing this site.
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