by Marc Comeau

About A Webmaster Developing a website goes far beyond understanding underlying technologies Determine your requirements Plan for the future Automate Most importantly - Know Your Audience

Requirements What does it need to do? What kind of information will be on it? How / Who will update that information? How often do will we make major changes? Who are you trying to reach? Other considerations

Requirements - Example Uptime Resistant to database downtime Fast Accessible As standards compliant as reasonable Distribute information effectively Long term distribution of content responsibilities

Requirements - Example - CMS Design Our CMS writes out complete files to the filesystem Advantages If DB fails or network connectivity between DB and webserver is lost, web site remains intact Delivers plain files, no processing involved, very scalable Maintains all key features of a content management system Disadvantages Lag between change in CMS and update Due to lag, it’s impossible to provide certain features within this architecture

Future Planning We all know it’s important to plan, but what does that really mean? Scaling Traffic Server load from existing or new features Disk space & bandwidth Good software development practices Proper database design is critical

Future Planning - Example (Good) Portal User login, group management, restricts tools by group Focus on data re-use New challenge of our “Big Board” allowed us to re-use our data in a different manner

Future Planning - Example (Bad) Thesis Defences To simplify development we took a shortcut Adding guest lectures forced us further into our problem Now that we’re trying to re-use this information, we’re looking at a significant overhaul.

Automation What can be done by a computer should be done by a computer Look for tasks that are Simple Repetitive Follow a fixed set of instructions Automation is at the very core of expansion

Automation - Example News system News are set with start and end dates Simple right? Results of this simple automated step Don’t have stale items on the web site If I’m sick or on vacation, news will take care of themselves Can preview for slow news days and avoid dead space

Automation - Another Example Thesis Defences Used to be a manual process Menen would send out the I would add it to the news Caused delay problems Now Menen uses a form in Portal Sends out the Publishes to website And shortly with publish to Big Board

Know Your Audience The web requires a good understanding of those with whom you want to communicate Who you’re trying to reach contributes to your design decisions Also contributes to the language you use on a website Will be the ultimate measure of your success

Identify Your Primary Audiences This will either come from your intuition, your business plan or the website owner Consider the Primary Audiences of Important to really understand the primary audiences because subtle differences can turn into significant design choices.

Related Sites Still Have Different Audiences Even when very closely related vs vs Our primary audiences Prospective Students Current Students Faculty Staff Community / Friends

How Do We Know If We’re Succeeding? Web Logs Gives raw data on usage Needs to be interpreted somehow

How Do We Interpret Web Log Files? By Hand tail, head, cat, less, more, etc… grep awk / gawk sort, uniq, wc Automate Custom scripts Web stats packages are simple and effective

Problems with Statistics Packages Many statistics are interpreted and as a result aren’t 100% reliable Won’t get always get very detailed information on your audience (unless you spend a lot of money) Can’t tell you anything about people who aren’t coming to your site

Conclusion Understanding technology is a necessary first step The development of a medium sized website involves many other aspects Large website share similar challenges but add hardware complexities and cost of mistakes is much higher Best way to learn is to get out there and do it For more information visit