Patterns for Personal Web Sites
These ideas are under consideration for being added to the patterns for personal Web sites.
Meta-Information. Each page should have accurate meta-information in its HTML header. This allows search engines to index the page effectively. This pattern is especially important for Deep Content or a Gift to the Community.
Write to Standards. Write HTML to published standards, not specific browsers. Not only do browser-specific pages break on other browsers, they may well break on newer versions of the browser you wrote them for. Writing to standards ensures that everyone can read your pages. Make sure your HTML declares a DTD & validates against it. If you use style sheets, make sure they too validate.
"Under the Hood" Page. It's fine to be proud of awards your site has received, but putting them on your home page wastes space and makes it load slower (which makes it less of a Useful Home Page). Instead, put them on a separate "About this Site" page which describes why and how you created the site, which kind of server it runs on, what awards it's won, and other "under the hood" information. [Likewise, visitors assume that every page is valid HTML, so there's no need to plaster a "valid HTML" badge on each page of your site.]
Sparing Images. Each image, no matter how small, adds to load time. This problem is exacerbated by high latency, low bandwidth, and the browser's limited number of TCP/IP connections. Rule of thumb: if it's not absolutely necessary, don't add it. This also applies to other multimedia content.
Growth by Accretion. Don't remove out of date pages or information. Instead, note what's changed, why it's changed, and the date of the change (Freshness Dates). When an entire page is out of date, sometimes it's best to move the existing page's content to a new page, and change the old page to an explanation of why the old page is out of date (providing a link to the original version, of course). Maintaining the original URL is required for Unchanging URLs.
Open to All. Write your site so that it's accessible to everyone. Test your site in several ways: using a text-only browser such as Lynx, a graphic browser with fonts three times the default size, in a very small browser window, etc. Test Offline Readability. This proto-pattern and "Write to Standards" reinforce each other.
Goal Patterns are a class of patterns I haven't really considered. They answer the question "what do you want this Web site to achieve?". They are probably the top-level pattern from which all the other patterns grow. Examples of goal patterns include Reward Visitors, Reward Exploration, Reward Return Visitors, and the "Open to All" proto-pattern above. Adding this class of patterns to the existing set would probably result in a restructuring of the patterns for personal Web sites.
Last updated 18 June 2002
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/under.consideration.html
All contents ©2002 Mark L. Irons