In my recent post "It's on the Menu….", I touched on my loathing of 'Under Construction' as a page content. I guess I should now take the time to explain why I get so annoyed when I come across it on websites (and believe me, it appears more frequently than you may think!). In the early days of Internet Web Design, there seemed to be an accepted culture of creating the structure of your entire site and then populating it with data over time. This, I suppose, may have come partly from the fact that the people creating these sites were called "Website BUILDERS", who therefore thought they had to apply the same logic to building a website as that of building a house and then filling it with furniture: 1. Decide on a location This equated to registering the domain name, thus giving the site somewhere to live. 2. Purchase a plot They would then search around for the lowest price for highest disk space on hosted webspace, where they could build. 3. Draw up the architectural plans Crazy as it sounds, this often seemed to be optional and ranged from highly structured layout diagrams to pages of allegedly links pieces of scrawled paper to 'it's in my head' to 'I'll work out what we need as I start working on it' 4. Lay the foundations At this point the Site Builder would create the base point of the site, usually an landing page titled index.html 5. Build the Walls From the initial index.html page a spider's web of interlinking pages would be created, all with headers as to what the page is eventually going to be about, most with links from the original index.html page and all with the dreaded "Under Construction" text. Or, and this is what REALLY used to drive me crazy, an image or animated gif of roadworks or a building site. WHY? In the time it's taken you to find that image, upload it to your webspace and create the code on the page, you could have written a basic paragraph about what the page states to be about! It's at this point that I feel I need to abandon looking at the remaining stages of putting in the windows and doors (the page content) and putting on the roof (getting the sign-off that all the site was linked correctly and worked), because that's what those site builders seem to do. From here there appears to be no rhyme or reason as to what pages get worked on, what links were created where, or even how relevant the content was. Indeed, it seemed that they completely forgot the fact that they were working on an entire website and saw it more as a number of individual pages with fonts, themes and colour schemes mismatching so badly as to give the impression that they had sacked the virtual "interior decorator" and had employed Stevie Wonder to do the job instead. OK, so maybe I'm getting a little off topic in that I'm starting to focus more about the value and presentation of the content than the complete lack of any content at all and that's what confused me then and continues to confuse me to this day. Current thinking is that "Content is King" and there are plenty of blogs and pages out there about this subject (as well how the content should be presented) and it is the fact that I have lived by this motto for so long that means I get so frustrated when I still come across those "Under Construction" pages. Let's be honest, are they REALLY under construction? If so, shouldn't there be some evidence of even the slightest amount of work having already being carried out? And if the person responsible for constructing that page feels they can justify the lack of anything visible by the argument "It's on my machine and not ready for publishing yet" then that simply gives me even more ammunition to reply back to them that if they feel so strongly about what is and isn't good enough for the viewer to read, then how can they allow an empty page to sit there frustrating every one who lands on it? The apparent reason (or at least the one I have heard quoted the most) is that "this lets viewers know that something will be appearing here and to come back and check regularly". I have even seen that put as an addendum in text to the "Under Construction" graphic. Believe it or not, viewers would rather not know that "something WILL BE here" and would rather wait until "something IS here". Furthermore, to expect them to "keep checking back regularly" is like saying "I haven't got a clue when I'm going to put something here, so I can't give you any indication", they're just not going to keep coming back to an empty page on the off-chance that you've finally extracted your finger and posted some content! That really is where the crux of my hatred stems. The fact that there is not even any indication as to how long the page has been "under construction" or how long I should "keep checking back". Did this page appear this morning and by this afternoon it's going to have some content? Or was it created in 1995 and has, in reality, been forgotten and is never going to be completed? Put simply, web constructors should remove any pages from their site which contains "Under Construction", "Check Back", "Coming Soon" or any other connotation which implies that they are working on it, when we all know that what it actually means is, "I put this here with the best intention to get round to it, but I may not even work on this site or be employed by this company any more". In this generation of high speed access and instant information, the browsing masses are demanding more and more at a faster rate and it is becoming increasingly important to provide them with the information they want quickly and in as easy a manner as possible, in order to not only give them what they need, but to also retain their interest and, with it, their future visits. My full blogs (including useful hints and tips for SugarCRM) can be found at www.sugaruk.co.uk/blog.
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