A Web site builder's home page can be his castle, explains Brian Whitaker

The Guardian, 2 July, 1998

SOMETIMES I visualise my Web site as a hospital patient constantly visited by students of anatomy. They don’t come to admire, but to prod, poke and dissect. One even sent me an e-mail pointing out that I have a file on my site called “home.htm” which is not the home page.

Behind this lies a story. In its brief history, Yemen Gateway has had several home pages but I haven’t renamed them, for fear that it would cause mayhem with my links.

One of the greatest dilemmas faced by any site-builder is deciding what to put on the home page. Some postpone the decision with a picture of a door or a message saying “click to enter”. A few carry this to extremes and end up like a medieval castle surrounded by moats, walls, drawbridges and turrets.

My favourite candidate for the most heavily fortified Web site ishttp://www.casanet.net.ma/users/icone/which promotes the joys of Essaouira, a seaside resort in Morocco. The first page is a picture of the world from space. Click on the French flag below it and, by a strange twist of logic, you’ll get a map of Africa (there’s a British flag, too, but that leads nowhere).

Clicking on Africa takes you to a third map. By now, your Pavlovian response is well trained and when the fourth map — the town of Essaouira — appears, you immediately click on it. But this site is cunning. Nothing happens. Instead, you have to scroll down the page to click on an arrow.

Next, there’s an introductory page with an arrow at the bottom which takes you to a picture with three lines of text in the sky. These turn out to be links to another page with four more options. By now, the user has downloaded seven pages and spent around two minutes getting to the real content — which, fortunately, is excellent.

Yemen Gateway’s first home page, at the development stage, was a simple list of contents linked to each section of the site. As the content expanded, this became unwieldy and I switched to frames, with a navigation panel on the left and a “home page” on the right.

At the time, I had no intention of carrying news on the site. But then a lot happened in Yemen. The prime minister went on strike, villages were swept away by floods, a British family was kidnapped, a BBC film crew was arrested, and last week 50 people were killed in riots. The temptation to include news became too great, and I changed my home page again to start with the news headlines.

Deciding to include news is a major, ongoing commitment. But there are simple ways to give almost any Web site topicality without much effort. For instance, Yemen Gateway has the following link:http://search.excite.com/search.gw?c=timely&sort=date&s=yemenWhen visitors click on this, a search engine trawls the Web sites of 300 news organisations and displays links to the relevant items. The search word can be almost anything: substituting "garbage" for "Yemen" produces more hot news about waste disposal than you ever imagined existed.

FEEDBACK:

• Mick Clark- Poking and prodding. 2 July 1998
• David Thorpe- Advantages of SGML, etc. 3 July 1998
• Ali Alyemeni- Wonderful website. 6 July 1998

CLICK HEREto add your own commentsto add your own comments

© Copyright Guardian Newspapers Ltd 1998