Internet citizenship

"A mighty maze! but not without a plan"

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle 1

World Wide Web plan

Current Web scape

You might be just starting out; reading this before you write and publish your first Web page. If so, you don't have any Web scape. You can skip this bit.

But that is unlikely. Probably, you have written a few Web pages, or maybe a lot of Web pages. You might have one sprawling site, or lots of pages scattered around different servers.

First of all, list all the pages that you know about. Then jump on your favourite search engine and do some ego surfing. That is, search for yourself on the Web. Find all those pages that you have forgotten about.

Make a site map

If that is the case, the first thing that you have to do is survey your Web scape. Find out where all those pages are, and record them into a site map. Have a look at my site map for an idea of how this might work.

Principles of good practice

By and large, these points apply to your Web scape as a whole.

Link rot

Once you have published a page, leave it where it is. That is the only way to

Universal accessibility

User testing

Eliminating errors

Link Alarm.

Automatic navigation aids

Tap map.

Metadata and searching

Inference find.

How do we get people to do good metadata? DSTC and the automatic Dublin Core generator, esp for key words.

Elements of design

By and large, these points apply to individual Web pages, or small groups of pages.

Identification of the audience

Writing for the World Wide Web

Universal accessibility

All of these points are worth repeating.

Cascading style sheets

Templates

Headers and footers

Standard navigation systems

Advice on images

Advice on colours

Dr Bandwidth's Seven Deadly Sins

And rational explanations of why they are bad.

Working with RMIT

Standard navigation systems

This is worth repeating here.

The RMIT home page

Pages staff might be looking for

Pages all students might be looking for

Pages local students might be looking for

Pages international students might be looking for

Pages other people might be looking for

Pages you might be looking for