I've been a CompuServe user since the early 1980's. Since late 1995, CompuServe has provided its customers with the ability to create and publish their own web pages. On December 27, 1995, finding myself with some spare time, I started our page. It began modestly as a few links and a few pictures, as well as a few paragraphs about Catherine and me. Whenever the urge struck, we added to it. Content was important. Catherine and I have broad interests like most Mensans; interests that others share. I believe that most of our early content focused on our Egyptian Mau cats. The Mau is a rare and striking breed of cat that has evoked a lot of feedback from our visitors. As I began to collect an eclectic list of links, I added that to the site. I have a link to Astronaut Tom Akers, who was one of my calculus teachers in college and who was the primary repairman for the Hubble telescope. I also link to a site that has fantastic Zeppelin photos, an incredibly detailed site specializing in British television shows, sites about tornadoes and thylacines and obscure manuscripts and bizarre murders. I don't link to sites like Dilbert, not because I don't like them, but because everybody else links to them. The information is so available on the Web that my adding it would contribute little.
I added a section called "The Shrine of the Unsung Musicians", dedicated to those musicians who should have been more popular than they were. Catherine and I added an "Ohio Wines" page, since we've spent a lot of time visiting wineries in Ohio. We included names, addresses and telephone numbers, impressions, adventures, news items related to wines and anything else that we thought others might be interested in. In other words, we shared our unique knowledge via the Web.
As we added things, we learned. We kept the main page fairly clean so it would load as quickly as possible. The graphics on the main page are mostly tiny icons that give the visitor a taste of what lies deeper in the site. If interested, he can pursue it. If not, only a few seconds were lost. We have avoided overuse of fancy techniques, such as animated gif files, which can slow down navigating the site. We organized our information more logically. Originally, we had all the cat information on one page, but as the size of that page grew, we split it up into a page for each cat and a general Mau page, basically a Mau FAQ. We encourage feedback from visitors and have had a lot of it. Some are questions, some are comments, some just express appreciation of our efforts.
More recent additions include some of the Brain Candy articles I've written (the first eight, so far) and an HTML version of a paper I presented at a professional conference in 1985.
We're not a very busy site, but we have been noticed. In January, 1996, we won "Sprynet Site of the Week" honors, mostly on the strength of our Egyptian Mau material.
Our site certainly isn't perfect. No matter how carefully I proofread it, I occasionally find typos and flaws. Information goes out of date. At least one separator line is out of place. Not every page links back to the main page. Our biographies are too detailed (too much info that might be used improperly). There is often too much of a lag between the time we receive e-mail from a reader and when we respond (sorry about that.) There are things on the page that should definitely be removed, like the Mothers' Day card I put there for my mom to download. It's still there for anyone to see. So one more tip I would advise you is to never stop correcting, upgrading and improving your site.
If you visit our site, look at it with these points in mind and feel free to comment. We'll write back, eventually.
CATBAR - Brain Candy 13 - Critiquing A Web Site / Brian Rock / November 9 1998