[Up: design lab] [Robot Wisdom home page]

How to build web-resource pages

"I have learnt to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge... how to gather, how to order and how to present a given material." --James Joyce, on his schooling with the Jesuits

Web publishing has brought about an entirely new paradigm for authors-- a good website must integrate all the available resources on that topic.

I expect that in a few years, many schools will have discovered that building such synoptic sites is an ideal class activity, so every topic will be covered by dozens or hundreds of different, well-maintained sites.

For now, though, the field is wide open-- very few topics are covered in this way at all. And if you choose a topic you're interested in, the process is big fun, especially for the type of people who enjoy crossword puzzles.

Examples:

I've done a dozen resource-pages for authors/artists I admire. This one for Iris Murdoch is the most popular, and links to the others. James Joyce is much more widely discussed on the Web, and required a very different 'portal' design. (I've added a very similar Thomas Pynchon portal.)

On a completely different topic, but with analogous design, is this regular expressions resources page. And a new experiment is this annotations approach to Robert Stone's novel, "Damascus Gate". And here's resources related to weblogs, arranged as a FAQ. And a lightly annotated shorter Finnegans Wake.

(None of these are remotely polished. Each has different requirements, so my ideas of standard formatting are always in flux.)

Here's a very different format for novelist Patrick O'Brian. And a portal-page for software called LiteStep.

You can try these Google searches on 'web resources', 'annotated online' or 'online annotations' or just 'annotated' or 'annotations' to see what's been done online. Here's a AltaVista search for pages titled 'web resources'.

Search-engine placement:

One way to think of resource-pages is that they're trying to be the best possible 'hit' when someone searches for that topic on a search-engine, because they offer a concise digest of all the other relevant pages, and should therefore be the first place a searcher will want to look.

Actually attaining that #1 position is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. But search-engines are finally starting to evolve, and their evolution will necessarily be towards recognising the best resource-pages.

Replacing others' ToCs

Another way to think of these pages is as a substitute for (and improvement upon) the navigation-pages offered by each specialised site. Normally, these 'tables of contents' (ToCs) link only to the dozen or less main pages on that same site, and require exhausting exploration to discover all the good pages there. Repeat this process over a dozen separate sites, and you'll be plenty frustrated.

Web-resources pages merge all these separate ToCs onto one neatly arranged page.

Techniques:

The mechanics of finding the links are pretty straightforward. I use the free version of Copernic99 as a startingpoint (Mac or Windows). It collects and sorts 1000 URLs via a dozen different search-engines.

This only works, though, if you can specify a reasonably distinctive search-string. And some topics will offer far, far more than 1000 hits, so you'll probably do better starting from Google. Adding the word 'links' to your query is a good way to find links pages to explore.

Try to survey everything that's available before you start doing the real writing. (Composing an outline beforehand is good too, though, because you may get swamped by other's approaches, and you need a way to recover your original point of view.)

If many available pages are similar, choose the best two or three to feature. (Don't limit it to a single one, because websites vanish at a truly alarming rate!) See my Joyce portal for an approach that allows many almost-identical pages to be arrayed very compactly.

Choosing a topic:

It's a bit tricky to find a topic that has a decent range of Web resources, but not vastly too many.

Prose style:

You want to create a readable page that integrates all of these... not just a random list.

Writing for the Web demands a very direct and engaging (and informal!) style, broken up into short paragraphs. If you're doing a fanpage for a person, you pretty well have to use a timeline or chronological approach. If you're covering an event or an abstract topic, you want to write a compact overview that includes all the liveliest tidbits right up front-- suspense and deferred gratification have much more limited appeal on the Web.

Every concept this overview touches on is an opportunity for a link to external resources. Because most of these will have been created by enthusiasts rather than gradgrinds, searching for them can be genuinely delightful-- the added value of each link isn't just another dull encyclopedia article, it may be anything-- actual memoirs by a participant, RealAudio samples, the full etext of an important document.

Anchor text:

How to format these links is probably the greatest unsolved problem of Web design.

You can either highlight them in passing (en passant links), or more subtly add a little text button [qv], or more grossly add a visible URL: http://www.robotwisdom.com/

Each of these styles seems to be the right choice under some circumstances, but precisely which circumstances no one knows, yet. The visible-URL style is handy if you plan to post the page to Usenet or a mailinglist.

Text-buttons:

I'm currently most enthusiastic about text-buttons, because they're easiest for the eye to skip over. My favorite comes from academia: [qv] for 'quod vide' or 'which see'. But usually you want something a little less anonymous, like [cite] or [source] or [more] or [info] or [pix], etc etc etc.

Compact lists:

Before I did the Joyce portal I did an earlier version [qv] that was much messier. But because so many pages offered 'a short bio and pic' it made more sense to collapse these into a compact list, with only a few characters for each link.

Two problems arise-- what anchor-text to use for the link, and what order to sort them in? I usually try to sort in best-first order, because the first link is the likeliest to be clicked. A one-word description of the source seems like plausible anchor-text.

Another example is many book-review links in a row. These can be sorted into positive, negative, and mixed. The anchor-text can be either the name of the periodical or the word that best sums up the review. [example]

Beyond search-engines:

Almost any musical reference can be linked to a one-minute RealAudio sample at CDNow, Tunes.com, or CD Universe. Or even to an MP3 search. (Add 'RealAudio' to your Google search to find other samples.) Movie references should link the IMDb's combined-details page.

eBay offers lots of images of obscure collectibles, but you might want to steal these since they're so short-lived. Author pages can have live links to eBay searches, for good deals or rarities. Bibliofind also offers book rarities.

Deja.com articles can be linked, or threads, or newsgroups, or queries. Many online periodicals require you use their search engine to find articles.

Maps seem problematic to me, but Expedia and MapQuest are widely recommended. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias are indexed with some search-engines, others not. (To find the translation of a foreign phrase, search for the phrase plus the English name of the language: "cabrones spanish".)

Future challenges:

Some things I'd like to be able to link:

- a currencies-converter that handles historical dates [near miss]

It's also useful to imagine how search-engines may someday assist in building resource pages, eg by detecting mentions of dates on pages that mention the topic, and sorting the results by these dates as a crude form of timeline. (twURL is a step in this direction.)

Site maintenance:

Ideally, once you've done the initial global web-search, you want to keep an eye out for new Web sites to link, and especially new news articles that come along. A priceless resource for detecting new sites is TracerLock which sends you an email every time it detects a new page at AltaVista, using your specified search patterns.

Excite NewsTracker, TotalNews, and InfoJump are also worth checking on from time to time.

Suggestions

You can submit a new URL or any other suggestion for this page by typing it into the box below. It will instantly become visible to anyone at this comments page. I should get around to checking it out and updating it above within a week or three, at which point I'll delete it from the comments page.

If you want credit, include your name and email (otherwise it's anonymous). You can use HTML but you don't have to.

Web-design pages:
main : academia : info-design : adding value : resource-pages : lessons-learned : best-worst : plugging leaks

Special topics:
surfing-skills : url-hacking : open content : semantics : pagelength : linktext : startpages : bookmarklets : weblogging : colors : autobiographical pages : thumbnail-graphics : web-video : timeline of hypertext

Anti-XML/W3C/etc:
structure-myth : page-parsing : firstcut-parser : html-history : semantic web

Design prototypes:
topical portal : dense-content faq : annotated lit : random-access lit-summary : poetry sampler : gossipy history : author-resources : hyperlinked-timeline : horizontal-timeslice : web-dossier

Website-resource pages:
RobotWisdom.com : Altavista.com : 1911encyclopedia.com : Google.com : IMDb.com : Perseus.org : Salon.com : Yahoo.com

Older stuff:
design-lab : design-checklist : HyperTerrorist : design-theory : design cog-sci

Hosting provided by instinct.org. Content may be copied under Open Web Content License.