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The "Charles Explains..." column write charlescarroll@learnasp.com with feedback
Happy New Year from the site!!! A review of the tiny bit of work we did on the site last year...
The site grew and was improved in some essential ways in 1999.
I personally met some great people in the ASP Community face-to-face:
For me, 1999 was a year
1999 I raised Asplists.com from an infant to an Adult quickly so that thousands of questions that were getting no answer anywhere could get rich, detailed answers. Then I could mine the archives to write lessons of a new depth and quality based on the geniuses who hang out at www.asplists.com
Not so many people noticed but the listserver signups used to have an email address and join/leave button only. Now they have links that were quite a bear (the bear on the left ties into this theme) to compile but every time I saw useful subject URLs on a list, I took the time to transfer those to the signup forms. Imagine you were researching some more arcane topics like Index Server, RDS, Remote Scripting, Printing/database reports from browser, or Index Server. Where to start? Nobody knew!
Of course I updated well over a hundred different lists throughout the year including links for the non-English lists.
What did we do to existing articles?
While some other sites were emphasizing their new articles, and we were not emphasizing our new articles as much some casual readers thought we were slacking off. They were looking at VOLUME and not factoring in that other sites NEVER revise old articles in response to reader feedback. But thousand of readers this year wrote us about how they used our tutorials and when they couldn't adpat them to their site. They were shocked when we improved the tutorials to make it more useful to them.
Better Learn Navigation
Our highest trafficed section is http://www.learnasp.com/learn
In early 1999 there were only four options:
1. TOC (table of contents) 2. Print View 3. Prev Page 4. Next Page
By the end of 1999 there were many more options:
5. Print All (this was a huge project) 6. Tree-View (this took a couple of hours) 7. A-Z index tabs thanks to Scott Mitchell's suggestion 8. Email this 9. Download
A-Z tabs are my favorite. Finally I clicked on S to find the session lessons appear!!! Yeee-hah. And some subtle things improved. Subsections used to not have relative page numbers. If you were on the Web version you didn't notice but a printout would not have page numbers. We made accurate page numbers as well as hyperlinks. I neglected my 12-14 months old to program this so I hope it is liked. He found himself turning to other role-models since I was too busy programming to influence him.
Finding Lessons Easier
New lessons were hard to located since they were inserted into the massive http://www.learnasp.com/learn TOC. Modified lessons were tough to locate and beginners weren't finding some lessons I knew they needed. So I added three new panels:
I placed those 3 panels on the main page and discovered a usability tip I never read anywhere. People if confronted with 8-12 links click on the first 3 more often even if they are duller than later options. Thus I added a new wrinkle. When my main page is refreshed those panels randomly re-order. (try it. Refresh our main page several times and watch the lessons move) A quick examination of my logs, the questions reader sent in, showed readers were finally locating and visiting all lessons equally.
My wife, Hitoshi and I think a site's search engine makes a huge difference. (ok Hitoshi doesn't care BUT we are raising him so he will one day...
Naoko and I both use the web to do all travel research, shopping, recreational surfing, directions, yellow pages, and we live the Web Life so we interact with hundreds and thousands of websites a year.
I hated our old search engine for many reasons. (At least we had one, I go to some medium sized sites that do not...) The first reason I hated it was that it found too many drafts and extraneous results. The other reason is output format was limited. The third reason is I wanted a search box on every page like Amazon but how eluded me. But I sllapped together our old search in 5 minutes with the Front-Page search bot.
Every time I tried to write a better search several things stopped me:
So late this year I finally solved the first round of problems:
All this work on search paid off for anyone building a website as I made my source code to my search available to anyone browsing the site so they could benefit from my painful months of research, see: http://www.learnasp.com/search/how.asp.