http://www.cs.dal.ca/

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http//www.cs.dal.ca/
by Marc Comeau
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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

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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

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Requirements - Example

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

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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, its impossible to provide certain
  features within this architecture

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Future Planning

• We all know its 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

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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

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Future Planning - Example (Bad)

• Thesis Defences
• To simplify development we took a shortcut
• Adding guest lectures forced us further into our
  problem
• Now that were trying to re-use this information,
  were looking at a significant overhaul.

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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

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Automation - Example

• News system
• News are set with start and end dates
• Simple right?
• Results of this simple automated step
• Dont have stale items on the web site
• If Im sick or on vacation, news will take care
  of themselves
• Can preview for slow news days and avoid dead
  space

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Automation - Another Example

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

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Know Your Audience

• The web requires a good understanding of those
  with whom you want to communicate
• Who youre 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

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Identify Your Primary Audiences

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

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Related Sites Still Have Different Audiences

• Even when very closely related
• www.cs.dal.ca vs www.dal.ca
• www.cs.dal.ca vs www.medicine.dal.ca
• Our primary audiences
• Prospective Students
• Current Students
• Faculty Staff
• Community / Friends

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How Do We Know If Were Succeeding?

• Web Logs
• Gives raw data on usage
• Needs to be interpreted somehow

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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

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Problems with Statistics Packages

• Many statistics are interpreted and as a result
  arent 100 reliable
• Wont get always get very detailed information on
  your audience (unless you spend a lot of money)
• Cant tell you anything about people who arent
  coming to your site

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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
• http//www.cs.dal.ca
• http//aboutawebmaster.com