Setting up Web Archives: Tips of the Trade
Setting up Web Archives: Tips of the Trade
Welcome. This page is devoted to resources and information about setting up archives on the web. In particular, the focus is on archives of net-fiction and the like.
This web site is an outgrowth of a presentation (Powerpoint, 100K) I prepared for a panel discussion at a recent convention for fan fiction. All of the links from the presentation are collected on the as yet unfinished quickcard
Also, you can browse a sample archivist manual, sample manual (Word, 500K).
The hallmark of good web design is usability. You should learn about usability and especially good web site design before getting started. I strongly recommend browsing http://www.useit.com to read Jacob Nielson's usability tips. His book is outstanding as well, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. If you haven't read the book then you probably don't know how to design a simple, but usable web site.
Erik's guidelines:
Since I strongly suggest against using automated HTML tools, and at all costs avoiding Microsoft Word for HTML editing, what do I recommend? On the Mac, BBEdit; on UNIX, any text editor, vi, emacs, pico, etc.; on Windows, so far I use notepad still.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a wealth of information on their standards at their web site, http://www.w3c.org. However, the information is not particularly well digestable for the average user. To learn HTML basics, I recommend the "Barebones" HTML reference at http://werbach.com/barebones/. To learn about CSS and avoiding the dreaded <font> tag see http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css, they also have learning HTML documents.
The second component to following standards is checking your work. The W3C has several outstanding checking programs available over a web interface:
Also, I've pulled from the W3C web site a chart of the browser safe colors that is arranged in a particularly useful fashion: http://www.valdemar.net/~erik/colors.html
The content, that is to say the stories you are archiving, are the centerpiece, not your web design. This brings us full circle to the issue of usability.
Usability requires a user centric focus. And one of the simplest usability techniques is to be task oriented and figure out how easy/hard/well your site supports basic tasks. Some sample tasks: finding/searching for a story in the archive, browsing the contents of the archive, and reading a story.
Finding/searching: Does your archive design make it easy (or hard) for a user to find a story either through an obvious "Search" function or through the browser's "Find" command? Search is one of the most important and most heavily used functions of websites. Sometimes small changes in page/archive design can have a huge impact on searchability. For example, if all stories are linked from a single page then the user can use the browser's "Find" command to find stories. In contrast, if there are 26-links, one for each letter of the alphabet, say by title then the user will have to use "Find" on 26 pages to perhaps--or more likely not--find what they want. Thus, if your site lacks a search engine you might consider large page designs, built up indices, etc.
Browsing: How well does your site allow users to see the content and wander through it at their own pace? A search-only site does not support browsing since a user must know what they want. Do you have topical indices? Logical groupings? Etc.
Reading: Remember to use high contrast colors on all pages, and especially stories. Backgrounds and background images should almost never be used.
Try to plan ahead. A system that works well for 1-100 stories will fall apart at 1000. To the extent possible chose a file layout and setup that minimizes the pain of reorganizing. Using stylesheets, CSS, makes it extremely easy to change the look of pages quickly. Avoiding absolute links and the "base" tag improve the possibilities for easy site reorganizations.
high bandwidth consumption