Starting and Maintaining a Website

Undoubtedly you've come across it before, a "dead" website. Not the one which leads to a 404 Not Found page but one that has been abandoned by its creator, long left to rut and be forgotten. Be it a blog, an informative website, some kind of fan appreciation website, or something else, many webmasters rush to develop on a particular concept that lacks depth and any sense of a significant purpose, to publish a website that is all but destined to fail.

For those of you who have an ambition to create a website or who have a new website out, I have written some pointers pertaining to what I believe are crucial points in producing and maintaining a website, particularly one that thrives itself behind a community of people.

Establishing a Base: Drawing out and delivering on an effective concept

So frequently forgotten, but essential in website development involves the ability to create something fresh and original. Webmasters frequently opt to create generic duplications of websites that are already out there on the world wide web. It can be a good thing to have more than one option to quench your thirst in a certain topic of interest; if sports is your ball game, you may dislike the popular sports website provided by ESPN, and really appreciate the fact that there is a sports website that caters better to your own personal taste. However, be careful. If you think you can create a website with the same topic of 1000s of other existing websites with the simple reason that you think you can do a better job, watch out. Think about whether you are being naive and unrealistic. If you really think you can do a better job than the existing competition, think long and hard about how you can bring improvements to the table. Having a fresh perspective to offer on a common topic can help you tremendously in garnering enough interest in your take on the topic.

You may not like spending time with planning the groundwork for your website, but in the end it could save you countless time and could ultimately make the difference between you creating a successfully developed website and one that you would eventually abandon.

Planning is crucial. Think about what you want to do and how you will be able to do it. Be realistic, and don't lie to yourself about what you can and cannot do. If you think you will be able to create a website from scratch with very minimal knowledge of web programming, you may come to a disappointing conclusion. There are plenty of available website creators, Content Management Systems (CMS for short) and forum software applications (often free!) that you can use at your disposal if you are not knowledgeable or don't have enough time to make your own system from scratch. And if you don't like the idea of using something others created, there is always the possibility of adapting to something custom in the future.

In planning, be sure to lay out every minute detail. It is better to do more planning than what is needed than to not do enough. Hopefully someday I will get around in making my own version of a fairly typical checklist for preparing a website.

Providing Content: Communicating ideas by producing media to entertain and inform

Unless your website is virtually exclusively about communication and interaction, you will likely find that a website that people come back to is going to be a website that frequently provides fresh and interesting quality content. Even a community oriented website should still focus on getting the users to contribute their own content in some form, such as by hosting their blogs. In the end it is usually very important to provide content for your website. This is where it is advantageous to have a website that covers a topic that you are very knowledgeable about. With vast knowledge on a topic, you will find it a lot easier to write and provide content frequently. Do not rely completely on others to provide all of the content. While it is likely going to be the case that you will find others to help you in providing content, this is likely not going to happen right away. You may have to be exclusively involved in producing content until your website reaches a larger audience. Chances are when people see you working hard at writing insightful content, these people will likely feel more willing to also come in and offer their own share of knowledge.

Keep in mind in that videos, audio and illustrations are becoming increasingly popular and effective alternative tools for providing content over just providing everyday writing. Spark up your visitors by providing interesting and relevant media whenever it is possible.

Time and Commitment: Showing dedication and being responsible

Another factor to consider when making a website regards the time factor. If scarce on time, you may want to rethink the idea of starting a new website. If you are determined to do it with little time, be sure to state clearly to your users what they should realistically expect from you. This will help prevent disappointing your viewers. If you can manage to publish a new article once every week on the same day, then you have the advantage of the users coming back each week expecting to at least find something new on that day even if that is all you can provide with your limited time.

Realize that our lives take completely unexpected turns that can potentially impact your ability to always be available for your site, so try to prepare for these instances. This is one of the times when having a staff of people helping you out will help out the most. If you won't be around and you know about your absence in advance and have formed a close relationship with many of your website visitors, be sure to give advance notice of your absence.

Marketing: Spreading the word and staying true to yourself

Marketing your website is tricky and I cannot speak from experience on exactly what you should do, however I will state that while it is desirable to have a "popular" website, try not to be too overwhelmed by the concept of popularity. Having your website viewed by many can require patience and will almost always never happen in a very short amount of time. Whatever you do, try to avoid "selling out." Always remain loyal to your core user base. The people who are fans of your website before it hits mainstream popularity are the people you should care about. If you find yourself evolving your website just to cater to more people, your site may end up getting more generic and you may end of becoming less and less interested and less passionate about it yourself.

Whatever you do, try to be careful and find the right balance between remaining loyal to your most loyal and dedicated users, as well as ways to open up and broaden the appeal of your website to a wider audience. How to do this is up to you and will depend on different situations. Seek the feedback of others, including the fans and toughest critics of your website. You might find that the passionate users of your website may be more than willing to help spread the word out. Even websites can rise in popularity through grassroots campaigning.

Think of third party outlets that could help spread the word out about yourself. Perhaps you could post videos to YouTube that you make that relate to something about your website. Stay current with the trends and crazes that erupt on the internet. For instance right now could prove to be a good time to have a Twitter account for your website where you can post useful information on.

Creating a Community: Bringing the concept behind a community to the world wide web

The idea behind a community oriented website is becoming more and more popular as time moves on. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace focus on bringing people together in an online version of a community. For some this feels entirely natural but for others the idea involving such heavy online interaction is confusing. I believe it is a great idea to carry a community feeling to your website but at the same time try your best to make everyone feel welcome, including those who do not understand the point behind the whole social networking sensation on the internet. For instance, I believe it is a big mistake to require users to register to perform basic tasks on your website.

A great way to provide a community feeling to your website is to include a message board with your website. A message board is a place where people can post their thoughts and opinions in a given context of discussion. You may be familiar with message boards provided on many Facebook fan pages, however the type of message board you can include can be potentially a lot more complete and offer a lot more control than what Facebook provides. Some free message board options include SMF, phpBB, and MyBB. I of course hold a personal bias to SMF because I am a team member, but if you are interested in including a message board, I suggest you try out some different ones to find the one that best meet your tastes

Ability to Adapt: Making adjustments in times of rapidly changing preferences

Sometimes it takes a little bit of evolution to survive in the world of the internet. You may be familiar with the whole "Web 2.0" sensation going around the the internet right now. If not, you can always search Google to find out about it. It is debatable whether the whole trend of flashy, big buttons and curvy feeling provided by Web 2.0 is just a fade or something necessary to appeal to the masses. However there is always going to be the possibility that as time goes on, people are going to expect certain things out of your website. Don't be surprised that if your website lasts 5 years or maybe even less, the whole design of it which may seem perfectly fine and modern to you when you started, will end up seeming highly dated and dull after awhile.

The process of site redesigns are a very common practice on the internet. Some choose to make a bigger deal out of website updates than others do. Think along the lines of "My Website: Version 2.0!" for people who like to update in a dramatic fashion. Whether you want to casually release minor updates throughout time, or come out strong with flashy and big changes is up to you. But be sure to listen to user feedback. Try to avoid changing for the sake of change, but rather change and adapt to cater to the evolving internet standards and expectations. Don't run the risk of leaving your users surprised and unhappy about changes you make. Try to involve both your heavy users and casual newcomers to your site in the process of updating your sites functionality and appearance.

The Hard Facts: Maintaining a website is not an easy task

The truth is maintaining a website can be hard thing to do. If you are paying for hosting, you may have to pay more and more as your site becomes more popular. If your site becomes a huge deal, you may even find yourself in the position of having to pay for your own servers to use as well as paying for a team of employees to keep your site running. The bigger of a deal your site becomes, the more crucial and valuable it will prove to be for you to invest your resources into it. Certainly not every huge website was started by a major corporation, sometimes even the really popular ones started as a hobby project by a high school or college students. While popularity in such vast proportions won't come to most, do prepare yourself for the future.

Make long and short term goals of where you want to see your site progress. No site is perfect, and each and every site out there could use improvements. Always seek feedback from your visitors and your staff. It is unwise to assume that you always know best.

Staying Secure: The Three U's: Update! Update! Update!

Any software that you use can be hacked. Security holes are found by hackers who show no mercy when it comes to respecting your website. This is why it is important to always use the most up to date software. When an update is released for any software that you use, be sure to update your install of that software as soon as you possibly can. Be sure to check back for security updates for each and every software you use. This can be done by visiting each website that provides the software you use, subscribing to a mailing list that notifies you of updates as well as subscribing to RSS feeds when available where news updates are posted for the software.

And Good Luck!

Whether you are looking to start something casual or hope to someday become an internet entrepreneur, I wish all of those who are thinking of building a website or web service the best of luck. What I provided is just some advice I have to offer about what to think about when in the process of building and maintaining a website. But do listen to the valuable suggestions provided by others across the internet. What I had to say was a fairly general outline which did not particularly offer detailed feedback on what exactly you should do.

As always questions and comments relating to this article can be asked in a comment left here or by sending an email to my email address at thorsen.j@gmail.com.

Special thanks goes to Jade Elizabeth a friend and colleague of mine, for her help in proofreading this piece before it was published.

Uncovering Documentation

Do you recall the last time you opened the instruction manual to something, anything, using it for its one and only purpose: assisting you through a process? Maybe it depends on what type of person you are. I for one, am somebody who prefers to master the art of trial and error, making guesses, sometimes completely random and desperate to try to get something to work. But sometimes guessing can only get a person so far, sometimes one must resort to an instruction manual in order to properly troubleshoot or assemble an item that he or she has purchased. Sometimes instruction manuals feel natural and sufficient; think Legos. While other times you feel like an idiot, shuffling through the pages to find out why your product is not turning on, doubting to find your answer, but doing it out of sheer desperation.

I am going to admit that documentation, as I like to call it; the process of writing and rendering documents for instruction manuals, is a hit or miss with people. Some live by it, choosing to lead their life by following examples word for word, while others prefer to dodge reading documentation at all costs. Being one who lives with the philosophy of trial and error myself, it may seem like an unnatural fit for me to be directly involved with documentation on a daily basis. But I am. In 2005 I found myself involved with writing documentation in a official team membership capacity for the Simple Machines Forum software, SMF for short. As sudden as it seemed for me to be involved with the documentation process, things didn't slow down from there. Just under a year after joining the team behind Simple Machines, I was promoted to become the coordinator behind the entire documentation for the software when the previous coordinator was promoted to project management.

What I am going to describe here is just some of the nature of what it is like to "craft" documentation, as I will call it, a form of art so to speak. The entire process behind documentation if done properly can take wit, ingenuity and patience to get done right. Indeed the process behind preparing an instruction manual for any type of product may actually require trial and error to achieve even mediocre results. For instance, an idea for improving the documentation for a product may end up in the gutter, ending up as an ineffective way of communicating instructions. Sometimes it takes a test audience to work out what works well in guiding people through a process and what proves to be poor at conveying the required assistance.

The following is an actual statement I released to the documentation team of SMF in November of 2008, letting them know what I believe is crucial for documentation for the SMF project. What I believe is necessary for the documentation for SMF also applies to the documentation for just about anything:

• Documentation is the key to support; support is the key to maintaining a userbase. Documentation thus is the most critical point in holding a solid suppertbase, and by association is the most important thing in maintaining users.

• Users want clear and to the point documentation. They do not have the time to sit through massive technical documents and dig their way through the irrelevant parts to get at what they want; documents thus should be what the users want: clear and to the point. Documents should put emphasis on the most relevant, and separate the advance technical information from the basic crucial information.

• Documentation should hold to a professional standard of expectation. All officially published documentation should hold no grammatical errors and should be structured in an elegant and logical way; documentation should always make sense and never be unclear, documentation should be of excellent quality.

• The writers of documentation should acknowledge the various ranges of user expertise. Documentation should be available in a way that does not alienate and confuse the most primitive and basic computer user but also to not bore an advance user.

• Documentation should hold to a standard in layout and style. Documentation should always be consistent from one place to another.

• Documentation should revolve around user feedback. The best people to tell us what documentation should be provided and how it should be provided is by the users of the software. The Documentation Team should always try to seek user feedback to know where progress can be made.

The most crucial points I constructed about documentation is that documentation should always put the user in mind. An effective delivery of documentation is only effective because the people writing the documentation sought the feedback of actual people using the product that they are documenting. It is very hard to anticipate what users of a product will understand and what ideas they won't be able to grasp.

Another major point brought up above is the quality of the documentation. I have skimmed through instruction manuals with regrettable typos. When the quality of documentation is awful, one may assume that the person hired to write the documentation isn't fluent in the language they are writing with, and were mainly responsible for some other task in assembling the product but to cut costs they also were assigned the task of writing the instruction manual! This shows that for one, the company did not value the importance of putting out documentation, and only did it because it can be an expected norm in the consumer world. But to the reader, poorly written documentation can prove to be unwholesome (pitiful and messy). This would likely result in not effectively allowing the consumer to understand the instructions.

It is also my belief that when writing documentation, the writers should try their best to separate the more advanced material that not everyone needs from the basic fundamentals. Sure it is sometimes only the advanced topics that one may need to look up for a relatively basic product, but to an average person, reading through a clash of both basic and advanced concepts could prove to be overwhelming. Frequently in instruction manuals this objective is achieved by having an advanced concepts chapter somewhere in the book or to clearly box and label material that is only for the "advance user."

The Typical Documentation Process For Me

When starting a brand new document for SMF I need to perform a variety of tasks to make sure I am going about my work properly. First off, I look around to see if similar material was already covered elsewhere. It can prove demoralizing when one writes something only to find out someone else already started to work on the same thing. After I am absolutely certain that the topic I am to write about has not already been partly or completely covered, I communicate with the members of the documentation team so that they are aware of what I am working on. This is useful to prevent duplicate work.

Next, I check for standards. I look around for documents published in the same section as where the document in progress is going to be published, and examine what type of style and formatting they have so that I can closely match the same type of standards to the document I am about to write. A solid consistency in writing documentation is very important. It is not very appealing to find documents that are written completely differently from one page to the other. When reading through an instruction manual, it is ideal to read through it with the feeling that one person could have written it all, even though in reality a group of very diverse people may have worked together on it.

After checking for standards I get to writing, analyzing the SMF software carefully to document whatever aspect I set out to write about. During writing I check for user feedback to see if people have left advice about what type of information I should cover. I also may communicate with the other members of the SMF documentation team asking for advice and feedback on what to write about or how to phrase a certain sentence.

In the end, the entire process of documentation is like a form of writing. Technical writing to be precise. The kind I am experienced with is a form of group peer review in which we all examine "holes," as in what type of topics are missing documentation, and do our best to fill said holes in with information carefully "crafted" with our keyboards, one tap at a time. We rely heavily on the users of our software to assist in telling us what parts of our online instruction manual [1] is hard to understand, and what topics we are missing documentation on.

I greatly enjoy writing documentation and hope to continue a career that can allow me to pay due respect to those who find themselves writing documentation on a daily basis even if I may not pursue a career that directly involves documentation.

References

Here is the Online instruction manual [1] that SMF provides for its users that I work on along with three other people who are on the documentation team of SMF.

Here is a list of the current Documentation Team behind SMF.

Any questions or comments you are welcome to email me at thorsen.j@gmail.com. I will be happy to try to answer any questions that I can that pertain to documentation.