Saturday, June 26, 2010

Hands-On/Cobwebs-off



Do you have an exciting web site? It doesn't have to be a site for sore eyes, but it should change once in a while! It should do what it purports to be. Pictures should help tell an interesting story, not gobbledegook words or just more of the usual industry jargon. It needs to at least attempt to justify its existence in the vast ocean of cyberspace fecundity. It could give the impression that it is worth visiting more than once, or at all. It should not be boring.

It might be best to be a hands-on site, one where people can interact with what has been posted and allow some sort of 'flow' to the material being presented as significant. It should give good information and accommodate replies and offer responses to topical issues that the creator claims to be interested in. It requires an accountability and a continuity.

It should be like a flowing well-built dry stone wall. It should look nice and be structural, but also have a reason and purpose. It should be supporting and be supported. Where there are gaps, they should be addressed and fixed. Where there are weaknesses, they need to be mended, rather than let the typos, misprints, dead links, empty pages, and missing follow-up reports of events and discussions go unchecked, unattended and uncorrected. Such websites, like stone walls, shouldn't be allowed to clutter up the virtual landscape. Even though it's called a web site, catching and boring unsuspecting visitors to death isn't how it is supposed to work. We need to be inspired, or at least left with enough energy to move on and visit better sites that have more thought and care put into them. An unloved, cobwebbed site, like a badly built, crumbling wall, needs to be taken down. Whoever is responsible for creating it shouldn't just leave it there on the www.doorstep like an abandoned child.