In the previous chapter we took a look at what's involved in building a basic site -- hardware, software, and expertise. Very quickly, though, you'll want to explore the added dimension that audiovisual materials can bring to your online presentation, or to set your site in the context of an overall site for your library, to keep it up to date, and to develop measures for assessing the success of your efforts.

Making Your Site Interactive

No matter how simple you decide to make your initial site, one absolute essential is some way in which your readers can interact with you. The irreducible minimum is the mailto" -- a hypertext link that displays a pre-addressed e-mail form. It takes advantage of one of the real beauties of the web, the fact that responding electronically is even easier than filling out a prepaid postcard. You can make this link stand out by adding a button or other icon, like the "tell me more" buttons we've sprinkled around our site near the projects still in need of that special major donor.

The next step up from the "mailto" link is the form. The reader clicks on a link, a form pops up, she fills out the information and sends it on its way, receiving a confirmation from the server that the message has been sent. Some uses include:

Signing Up New Friends. Fill out an online membership form, select a level of giving, push the send button and, voila! instant friend. We start your membership immediately and bill you.

Collecting Pledges. We want to catch those donors in the instant that their emotions are engaged, and a form such as the one shown here allows them to act on their generous impulses immediately. Eventually, we'll offer credit card or digital cash payment options -- for now, we're content to bill our donors. This has not been a particularly active form for us, and to be quite honest, we didn't expect it to be in the early days when most surfers weren't making the connection between online activity and charitable gifts. What it did communicate was the fact that there was a need for contributions and an active campaign going on.

Click on the button to see the Showcase reservation form

RSVPing for an Event. As more and more of your stakeholders join the wired world, this becomes an easy and convenient means of accepting reservations for an event. We tested the concept at our Homecoming Showcase event in November 1996 and found that our wired Friends got a kick out of sending in their reservations electronically.

Quizzes, Surveys, Information-gathering or Involvement Activities. During our Homecoming Showcase event, we also held an Internet scavenger hunt for Penn students -- the prize was a Pentium computer with all the trimmings. Library Friends could join in the Web Hunt fun from their own computers with an online quiz -- if they got a certain number of the questions right, they received a "Great Web Hunt" pin and other small prizes. You can use similar forms to survey your members, gather opinions on important issues, offer similar contests -- or any of a dozen other ways to engage them in a dialog. As we mentioned in an earlier chapter, you can even use a form to sign up volunteers.

Creating Your Form

There are two parts to creating a form, one of which is not under your control. The part you can control is creating the form itself: most of the HTML manuals and several online guides will show you the coding and offer you an array of tips. The second part is under the control of your site administrator. Each form is paired with a script that resides in a special directory on the server. When your reader fills out the form and pushes the "submit" button, this script is then used to process the information contained in the form and to pass it along to your e-mail account, to a database, or to some other information repository.

Creating those scripts is fairly technical, and making an error in a script can cause security problems on your server, so your site administrator will most likely have to create it for you. If you are renting space from a commercial or a not-for-profit Internet service provider, you will need to consult with them to find out whether they support forms and what the procedures are.

The All-Singing, All-Dancing Site

You may have a topic that cries out for more of a multimedia approach. Our Marian Anderson centennial celebration is a case in point. It was also the project that moved us to acquire some multimedia equipment. Earlier we mentioned how we celebrated Marian Anderson's 100th birthday by expanding our online exhibition, "Marian Anderson: A Life in Song" (http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/anderson/). The audiovisual material consists of two video clips, including one of her landmark Lincoln Memorial concert; three songs, including the world premiere of her 1936 recording of Jean Sibelius's "War det on dröm;" and eight interview excerpts in which Miss Anderson discusses critical turning points in her life.

You can produce acceptable-quality web video if your machine has a video capture card, a sound card, and some horsepower. The video capture software comes with the video capture card; once you've spent $300 or so for the two cards, all you need is a VCR and some cables. Audio capture is also reasonably inexpensive; a cassette player or CD player and some cables, plus a $50 shareware program downloaded from the Web (we used CoolEdit from www.syntrillium.com), will get you started. If you want to go into video editing in a bigger way, you'll want to think about acquiring a more sophisticated program, such as Adobe Premier.

The two obstacles to audiovisual extravaganzas, at least at this writing, are bandwidth issues and cross-platform issues. "Radio quality" audio, which means AM radio, eats up .5 to 1MB per minute. Video compressed to fit even a small window is even more demanding -- between 6 and 10 MB per minute. If you are renting server space by the megabyte, each video clip could conceivably add $10-$15 to your monthly site rental. If your audience mostly lives in modem-land, you have to ask yourself how many of them are going to wait an hour for a two minute clip to download -- or whether you're ready to commit to something like streaming video, which allows you to view the material as it downloads. The other concern is finding the format that is most likely to be accessible to your audience. If your surfer doesn't have the appropriate software to view or listen to the clip, you will need to include links to a site from which the software can be downloaded. Despite these obstacles, audiovisual components can add an exciting extra dimension to your site, if you have a constituency that is likely to be able to make use of them. If many of your stakeholders have Ethernet access, if your site includes a server that processes streaming audio or video, such as RealAudio or if you plan to distribute your web site on a web-enabled CD, by all means consider adding sound and motion. For more on the advantages of putting your content on a CD, see chapters 10 and 11.

Getting Attention--Publicizing Your Site Where It Counts

Publicizing your site to the wide world is fairly easy. You navigate to the home pages of the major search engines such as Yahoo, AltaVista, or Lycos, click on the icon or text line that says "submit URL" or "suggest new site," and follow the instructions.

More important to you, though, is to reach those surfers who are coming to visit your library's site, since these people are more likely to become your friends, advocates, donors and volunteers than the world at large. To bring this about, you want to cross-connect with the rest of your library's site at as many points as possible. Here are a few:

Your Library's Home Page. As we write, we have a link from the Penn Library's homepage pointing to our site and labeled "Friends of the Library." We're in the process of updating our site and its name to reflect its broader purpose. Yes, we're about the Friends of the Library and the benefits of membership in that group. But we're also about the library's plans for the future, its staff resources, its named funds for books and other materials, its many benefactors, and -- an overarching theme -- its strategy for meeting the changing information needs of the University community as we approach the twenty-first century.

We're really about a lot of things that don't have all that much to do with membership in the Friends of the Library. Our new name will reflect this broader theme. As you name your own section of your organization's web site, think about what you name it and whether those few words on your organization's home page will draw your entire audience to your pages.

Other Cross-connections. Consider the rest of your library's site and lobby for connections wherever you see a possibility. Some of ours at Penn include:

• cross linking a donor recognition site with the web section for the department in which the donor's project resides;
• asking for a link from the "What's New" page for any news of events, new gifts, etc.;
• having a link from the Special Collections department to the Friends portion of your site.

If your library maintains an online calendar of library events, this would be an ideal place to cross-link your Friends events with your pages.

Keeping Your Site Fresh

There's a new term coming into vogue in the web development world: dead sites. Dead sites are the ones that are launched with great enthusiasm and then not maintained. You can spot them by their large numbers of broken links, their "last updated" notations more than a year old, their calendars whose most recent entry was August 1995.

Happily, a little preventive maintenance can keep your site current -- or at least not looking woefully dated. Here are some suggestions:

Remove the "Last Updated" Line from the Bottom of Your Pages. You can keep updating information behind the scenes in your HTML document with a comment that tells you (and the search engines) when the page was last modified. At our site, we're replacing those "last updated" footers with a simple line saying "this page maintained by friends@pobox.upenn.edu" -- and making the e-mail address a hotlink. One of the difficulties of a "last modified" date in public view is that you may update a page and forget to update that date. Your fresh page winds up looking like last week's news.

Take Down Your "Events" Pages As Soon As the Events Are Over. Our "Library Showcase" event was November 1-2, 1996. The pages were de-linked on November 3, although we left the pages on the server so that surfers who followed outdated links from other sites wouldn't find broken links (see "Link Rot," below).

Keep a List of Time-sensitive Pages, and Put Their Update Dates on Your Planning Calendar. This isn't foolproof, but it will help. Periodic checks of the pages on the list in addition to making changes as they come up on your calendar will go a long way to keeping you out of the "old news" trap.

Surf Your Site Looking for "Link Rot". This wonderfully descriptive phrase refers to those cases where another site you've linked to has moved or killed the page, leaving your surfers with an error message instead of the page they expected. This is particularly important if you're linking to someone else's time-sensitive pages. The other site maintainer may be scrupulous about removing outdated material, and this will leave your links hanging.

These techniques are all negative -- that is to say, they're ways to keep your site from looking dated. Our last tip is far more positive:

Put Your Hottest News at the Top of Your Homepage. When U.S. Supreme Justice William Rehnquist declared Richard III not guilty in a mock trial at Indiana University, in October 1996, that was hot news. When word reached the Richard III Society that the trial would be broadcast on C-SPAN in January 1997, that was hot news, too. Both were featured in the top news spot on the organization's homepage. The trial has since been superseded by other news -- at the moment, we're pushing our May 1998 conference -- still, Richard III's acquittal remains intriguing enough to merit a homepage mention. Less-hot news goes on our "what's new" page. (We actually maintain a mirror of our Richard III Society homepage with another filename, intro.html. All our internal links come back to that mirror page. Thus, when we want to showcase something particularly important to us, such as the annual anniversary of Richard III's death on Bosworth Field, we can devote our entire homepage to it. One single link then leads to the regular homepage.)

We gave the same "top billing" to our Penn Library Showcase event on November 1-2, 1996 -- and made sure we took it off November 3.

If you're featuring hot news on your homepage, it's especially crucial to do site maintenance to keep your homepage current. Mark your calendar; set your alarm -- but get the old news off the minute it gets old!

Measuring the Impact of Your Site

It would be nice if you could count up the online pledges, measure them against the cost of building and maintaining a site, and use that as the measurement of your site's impact. It probably won't be that simple, but here are some quantitative and qualitative measures you can use to evaluate the return on your investment in the Web. We'll use Laura's Richard III Society site as a whimsical example, interspersed with insights from some of the other sites she maintains.

Access Reports. Many Internet service providers make reports available to their customers. Laura gets a daily report for her Richard III Society site that tells her the total number of file requests, the total number of accessors, the number of hits per file, and the activity for each accessor (the server from which their request originated, and a list of files they requested). If challenged, she could tell you that in the month of January 1997 the site received 55,742 file requests from 4,826 individual accessors, and that the most popular pages, after the home page, were the ones on the Al Pacino documentary on Richard III. (Times have changed: since we wrote this chapter, the most popular page has become the Quick Start for Students.

The University of Pennsylvania Library makes a monthly summary available to its web developers, with information for each day, weekly totals, and totals for a bewildering variety of categories and subcategories such as type of browser and whether the image display function was turned on or off. These data are very important to a web development staff preoccupied with cross-browser compatibility.

Over at the nonprofit Internet Service Provider, LibertyNet, Laura gets a monthly access report for the site for the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, showing a breakdown of the files requested and the number of unique accessors.

Whether you get a detailed report or a summary, these access reports will help you determine how effectively your site is publicized -- that is to say, how many people visit any page on the site -- and how engaging your site is to its visitors.

Feedback from the Site. You can collect both quantitative and qualitative data from reader response to your feedback devices -- "mailto" links and forms. Laura can tell you, for example, that she receives on average three inquiries a day from the Richard III Society site. Usually two of them are from baffled high school students trying to find online references for a research paper -- so she knows that the site is fulfilling its primary purpose as an educational resource for students. The remaining inquiries are usually also research questions from the general public.

Laura also receives regular reports from the membership chairman on renewals and new memberships. Members who join from the web print out an online application form and in consequence are very easy to track -- so Laura knows that 2-3 new members join each week as a result of the web site. At $30 per member, this represents $300-$400 in new revenue each month, easily five or six times the $45/month the Society spends on the site.

Back at Penn, we're just beginning to put our E-Friend button all over our site. It's too soon for us to sit back and count the E-Friends, but stay tuned.

Comments from Your Stakeholders. A good development site does more than recognize donors or garner online pledges. It validates the organization's vision and communicates it in a clear and compelling way to a variety of stakeholders, engaging the viewer and encouraging a two-way conversation between web developer and reader. If you've done your job properly, you'll be hearing from those stakeholders -- your patrons, your colleagues, your volunteers, and your donors. Be sure to save the glowing tributes you receive from delighted Friends and colleagues (and be assured, you will receive them). They are eloquent testimony to your site's ability to engage not only the attention but also the emotions of its visitors.

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