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Help Me

“Help me…” — Green Velvet

Don’t make me go it alone!

I’ve noticed fewer and fewer people helping out with information. If you enjoy using my pages and discographies, please help me out. If you have information that should be included in one of my discographies or web pages, please feel free to send it to me! I want my discographies to be central repositories of information on musical releases by certain musicians so that fans will have access to useful information. (I realize there are about 5 dependent clauses in that last sentence. Sorry.) I realize that not everyone is as anal-retentive as me, but by keeping me ignorant, you’re only depriving your fellow fans. If you’re curious why I don’t have something listed, it’s only because no one has told me about it.

Have you created a web page that should be listed on one of my pages?

Tell me about it! I can search the net every so often and try to find your pages on my own, but everyone will benefit if you tell me about your web pages as you create them. Lately I’ve seen sites that link to me, mention that I have lots of links, maybe even steal some graphics from me, but the owners of those pages don’t ask to have their pages listed here. Yes, I have lots of links — I can link to you, too! I update my pages furiously and I love to swap links with people.

(If your fan page isn’t worth having other people link to it, should you even bother creating it?)

Have you created an official page for a band? Surf around and check out what the fans are doing! We link to you, so why not return the favor? Why not foster positive interaction with your fans? No one should expect that you necessarily fully endorse what we do, anyway.

To destroy the good will you have with your fans, and endanger your career, try suing them for the content contained on their sites. This goes for record labels as well.

Please do not submit your homemade CD-R tracklistings to online services like CDDB/Gracenote and freedb.org. This information is of no relevance to the rest of the world, unless you burn many identical copies of your discs and distribute them to many other people. If your audio playback program forces you to submit your info, switch to another program. If you absolutely must submit these, at least call your CD something like “Dave’s Favorites CD-R”.

Contact me via e-mail.

A few words of advice (RANT RANT RANT)

If you are going to write a web page for your favorite band, houseplant, carbonated beverage, or whatever, please take a moment to see what other enthusiasts have on their pages. Then do something original. Link to the other people’s pages. Find rare information and share it with others. Acknowledge their input. Check your spelling and your HTML. Make your web pages easy to navigate. Use meaningful TITLE tags. Use ALT attributes when you include graphics. Ensure that your graphics actually load. Don’t use .BMP files for web graphics. Keep your pages up-to-date and fresh. Keep the people who link to you aware of your URL changes. Don’t just disappear without a trace. Solicit comments from your visitors.

Don’t put all your keywords in your page’s title; when I bookmark your site, I don’t want my bookmark menu to be 3 feet wide to accomodate your page’s name. Don’t set your page’s title to “Welcome to my home page!” The page’s title should be descriptive and brief. Don’t spell your page’s name in all caps or with spaces between each letter unless that’s the proper way to spell it. And don’t leave your pages named things like “untitled page 1”!

Don’t tell your users to hit Control-D to bookmark your page. Why? Because not all User Agents use Control-D as a key combination to bookmark pages (i.e. the Mac uses Command-D in most browsers). The same goes for instructing readers to select items using a right-click, or using any particular interface convention or peripheral. Consider this: some UAs don’t even have Control keys. Or mice. Mind-blowing, isn’t it? (Shouldn’t people know how to bookmark pages by now, anyway?)

Please, please don’t abbreviate “Macintosh” with “MAC.” “Mac” is not an acronym. The Macintosh computer is produced by Apple Computer. Mac is the product; Apple is the corporation. Not vice-versa. The common modifier key on the Mac, bearing the [Command key symbol] symbol, is properly called the “Command” key. I know it also has an Apple logo on it, and I know the Apple IIs in your junior-high computer literacy class had “Apple” keys, but that’s not what they’re called on the Mac.

Realize that web design isn’t about taking absolute control of a reader’s experience. It’s about influencing and enhancing a reader’s experience. Web design is about using insight, not brute force. Don’t demand that your readers use your preferred browser, with your preferred fonts, your preferred window sizes, on your preferred platform, with your preferred amount of bandwidth. Be polite; use Cascading Style Sheets, flexible layouts, optimized graphics, and fewer multimedia gadgets. Don’t use fixed font sizes and pixel-based layouts (with some exceptions). Understand that if you make your site hard to use, users will become frustrated; frustrated users are much more likely to go to another one of the millions of pages out there. For more info on these subjects, read useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website and A List Apart’s A Dao of Web Design.

Why should I look at your page if it’s essentially the same as the last one I saw? Don’t rip off someone else’s graphics or words and try to pass them off as your own. Don’t think that loading a page with lots of graphics, sounds, scripts, frames, etc. makes a good page. Blinking, attention-grabbing things may make people notice your page, but it will annoy the crud out of them. Your page may take you a few seconds to load off your local disk, but it may take someone else several minutes to load it through a 28.8 bps modem. Don’t forget that people out there are using computers that are significantly different than yours — try loading your pages on other machines and with every browser you can find. Use nothing but Lynx to do your browsing for a week to a month to get some perspective. Avoid graphics and colors that distract from your content. If your content isn’t good enough to stand on its own, then don’t waste your ISP’s disk space and bandwidth. Finally, splash pages are a bad idea 95% of the time (“Splash screens must die” — Jakob Nielson, Designing Web Usability).

By the way, I do not claim my pages are perfect. Like me, they were imperfect when they came into the world, and will only improve through a continual process. :) Semper reformanda.

Web design advice: