How shines your tower, the only one Of that especial site and stone! Edmund Blunden, The Survival

Citation

Ellis, B. (1999), "How shines your tower, the only one Of that especial site and stone! Edmund Blunden, The Survival", Circuit World, Vol. 25 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/cw.1999.21725daa.002

How shines your tower, the only one Of that especial site and stone! Edmund Blunden, The Survival

How shines your tower, the only one Of that especial site and stone! (Edmund Blunden, The Survival)

Keywords: Internet, IPC, EIPC, PCIF

I have been asked about small companies generating their own Web sites, without previous experience. Probably, the main reason for this is that they feel that the £500 or so to hire a professional to make a small one exceeds their budget. Sure! It is possible: even the pros started with a first one! But, be warned, you must have plenty of spare time if you want a site to be convincing. How much is your time worth? If you have a couple of hundred spare hours and you fix the value of your time at £2.50/hour, then you may break even. Conversely, if you can sell enough goods or services to net more than £500 profit in 200 hours, forget about creating your site and hire a pro: he will probably make a better job of it than you can, anyway.

If you do hire a professional, or what appears to be a pro (you can find thousands of all classes advertising their services on the Internet and elsewhere), then try and find a good one, specialised in the type of business you run. No matter what business you are in, find a designer who knows your sector intimately. The terminology and jargon must not cause him to ask questions every five minutes. A butcher may know everything to be known about preparing a carcass, but he may not know what a BGA is ­ and it's unlikely that a schoolkid would either, even if he charges half the price of anyone else. Examine a couple of the sites that your candidate has created, noting the performance, such as how fast they download, as well as the appearance and the quality of the language (check for spelling mistakes, also). Additionally, remember that you are trying to project the image of your company with your site. The type of business can drastically alter how the site should look. A company promoting PCB fabrication is not trying to sell cosmetics, even less an "adult" site. Make sure your designer understands this. Above all, avoid the publicity agents who can produce an excellent prospectus on paper. You can be sure that, unless they have had several years' experience with Web sites, they will produce something that looks wonderful but is useless under practical conditions.

OK, so you still want to do it yourself? The first thing you will need is a WYSIWYG software. There are hundreds available, costing anything from nothing to a lot. Often you will receive exactly what you pay for. I don't recommend the beginner using an HTML editor, although he will probably need one later. Many word processors, such as Word for Windows and WordPerfect can generate HTML code from an ordinary document. Do not use these for making up even a simple page. It will probably look awful and you will almost certainly be disappointed. They also generate very uneconomical code, to boot. If you use Netscape Communicator 4.5 or later, the latest versions of Composer, within the suite, are not bad quasi-WYSIWYG generators which will allow you to edit the code, as well. Composer has the merit of a reasonably rapid learning curve to produce valid results, bordering on professional quality after a reasonable apprenticeship.

Without much doubt, the tool most used by the more successful professionals is Microsoft FrontPage. It is a real pig of a software to learn but, once you have worked out its intricacies (and there are many), you will never look backwards. It is full of little bits and pieces you should never need to use for making a technically-oriented site, but you learn to ignore these. This l-o-o-o-ng learning curve can be accelerated either by formal lessons or by using one or two of those thick manuals published by companies like Que or Sams Net, to replace the hopelessly inadequate offering that comes in the box with the CD-ROM. If you plan your site to exceed, say, ten pages within the first year and more thereafter, then this is the way to go: it will take you a month or so to produce your first page, two weeks for the second, down to a few minutes by the time you reach the tenth. Even then, you will still be learning. I have been using FrontPage for intranet and Internet Web site design for three years, now, and I consider that I know it reasonably well ­ to the extent that I can often sketch a complete site project up within a couple of hours, often to the amazement of my clients. l would not be without it, but I have certainly passed through all the stages of a long love-hate relationship with it. I am not alone with this ­ the FrontPage Newsgroup run by Microsoft is probably the most frequented of all forums, taking into account the number of items sold: there are many signs of similar feelings on it. It is therefore a software for the person who is serious about web creation and not for the dilettante.

Apart from the technical side of Web creation, there is also an artistic side. The answer to this, for technical Internet sites, is keep it simple and airy. Have a minimum of graphics and keep them simple and small (if you need a large picture, use a thumbnail). Browse through others' sites and note down what pleases and doesn't please you. Don't hesitate to ask for advice from whomsoever you are able to find and who knows what he is talking about, even paying for it, if necessary.

Finally, if you do decide to go ahead, I wish you all the luck in the world. You will need it when you consider that 30 percent of the sites on the Internet are deplorable, 50 percent more are, at the best, mediocre, 15 percent are good and only 5 percent can be classed as excellent for the purpose for which they are designed.

I know that a number of readers are also interested in what I have had to say about cleaning, contamination and the environment. I am taking this opportunity to mention that I have now started an open forum at http://www.protonique.com/solvents_forum If any of you have anything to say about any of these subjects, please do come and visit this discussion site and join in.

I have been asked why I have never reviewed the sites of various trades organisations in the circuit world. Quite frankly, I have no real answer to the question, particularly as I have looked at the IMAPS site for Microelectronics International. This question will therefore be answered forthwith by a critique of three of them.

http://www.ipc.org

Whoever thinks of trade organisations in our industry must think IPC. Without any doubt, it is the most progressive and the most influential, with the biggest membership. Their web site must be qualified as daunting from its sheer size. It is certainly the largest that I have ever written about and the difficulty is, in a few lines, to do it full justice. Please remember, because it is big, it does not necessarily mean it is good. The IPC site has many very good points and a few bad ones. I think that one of the worst ones hits anyone as soon as he tries to access it. If you happen to have a slow connection, the home page download seems interminable. Even at a respectable average speed of 1 kb/s, it takes 21Ž2 minutes to load the 158,031 bytes (this speed would be typical of someone using a 14.4 kbits modem on an average quality phone line or a 56 kbits modem on a slow IPS server, such as the free ones). This is far too long. The main reason for this is that it is all done with complex graphics menus: one alone is about 45 kb long. The items on these menus cannot be classed as icons because they are too large and complex. Then there are some thoughtless bits and pieces: for example, there is an advertisement for Netscape Navigator 3.0 which went obsolete at least 18 months ago, the current version being Netscape Communicator 4.51, at the time of writing. I would have liked it better had the Webmaster offered us a choice of the bells-and-whistles graphics and just a text version. Anyway, these menus allow access to the three main sectors, Assembly, Fabrication and Design, some eight more administrative sections and a few associated organisations. Unfortunately, the difficulties do not stop at the Home Page. Clicking onto any of the main sector graphics starts us off on pages with three frames. The top left one is a modest 4 kb frame acting uniquely as a menu item to take you back to the Home Page (hopefully well-cached!). Underneath this is a 33 kb graphics frame with a mapped graphic getting on for two screens high on an average monitor, depending on the size and resolution. The third frame to the right is where we find what we are looking for: information. These third frames consist essentially of text menus and, as such are reasonably fast-loading. Clicking onto the various items will take you either to hierarchical sub-menus or directly to one of the hundreds of pages of very useful information and these are frequently superb in content and are often fast to access ­ but, unfortunately not always. I certainly cannot fault the IPC for the information available. The real problem is finding it in a rather complex maze of hierarchies, for which there appears to be no sitemap, either overall or for the individual sectors. Happily, there is a Search box on the Home Page and this can be a help, provided you know a keyword. This gives up to 20 responses with apparent priority to IPC News Releases. To test it, I typed in "microvia" and 12 out of the first 14 responses were for the Press and two only would lead the surfer to technical papers. Notwithstanding, it would be difficult to recommend, with such a massive site, how to improve on the navigation, unless it would be to consider dividing the Web into four or more independent sub-Webs, each with its independent navigation system, including a search facility and a sitemap. At best, this would alleviate the problem. The rationale for this is that anyone accessing the site to look at, for example, something to do with fabrication, is unlikely to wish to access a design sub-Web during the same session. If he/she should, a cross-menu could allow him/her to swap sub-Webs. Whatever, there is no easy solution for this problem.

Stop press: Just as I was about to send this article off for publication, I checked the URIs and found that, in the two days since I wrote the above (20 May), the IPC have radically changed their site design. This has placed me in a dilemma. I cannot meet my deadline if I do a complete review/rewrite. I could have shut up and sent the text off as if nothing had happened. However, I choose to give a very brief corrigendum on the above, based purely on first impressions from a few minutes, "browsing":

1. 1.

   The heavy graphics on the home page and elsewhere no longer exist (thank goodness!).

2. 2.

   There is now a useful site map which makes navigation a lot easier.

3. 3.

   The graphics menu is much more "user-friendly" and self-explanatory.

4. 4.

   There is still a three-frame page structure.

5. 5.

   The pages now lack adequate meta keywords for search engine browsing.

6. 6.

   The Search facility works much better.

7. 7.

   Many of the pages within the site seem more or less unchanged.

8. 8.

   The IPC now prefer Microsoft Internet Explorer to advertise, rather than Netscape (why?)

9. 9.

   The name of the organisation has now been up-dated.

It is probable that the IPC Webmaster will be making some further changes before this new site can be considered definitive. Because of this, a full review is probably premature, anyway. However, I'm putting my initial scoring of the new site in parentheses after those of the old one, below, subject to a more in-depth examination, which I'll comment on in a future issue of this journal. It will be seen that these first impressions are much more favourable. The illustration (Figure 1) is of the new site.

Figure 1 The new IPC homepage

http://www.eipc.org

The European Institute of Printed Circuits (EIPC) is, of course, separate from the IPC, but the two organisations co-operate closely together. The EIPC Home Page is altogether more modest than that of its elder brother, totalling less than 60 kb. Even this is rather on the large side because of six moderately large graphics serving as the main menu. However, it should load in under one minute under somewhat poor conditions. Again, an alternative text-only Web would help those condemned to a poor connection into the Internet backbone, especially those in developing nations with relatively difficult telecommunications systems. All the pages are lacking titles, descriptions and meta keywords, so that there is little hope of the EIPC being found by interrogating a search engine. In fact, a search over nine popular engines did not produce a single "hit" to the EIPC site and just one other site with a link to it. The first menu item is (at the time of writing) an invitation to ask for details of an EIPC conference to be held within a few weeks but, unfortunately, without any programme details. A page or two devoted to this would have been more "user-friendly" than having to send an e-mail to obtain details. The next menu item is called "Speed News" and it summarises nicely many topics of interest to the industry, as well as listing new members. If I understand it correctly, this is, in fact, a sample of a weekly newsletter sent to members. That being so, it would seem that the Institute is "on the ball". The second menu item is a list of members and, here, I am frankly astounded. Of the 238 members listed, only 28 have links into Web pages. Perhaps the other 210 are so busy that they do not need the publicity generated by their own Web site? Surely not. I have mentioned this problem before, but less than 12 percent of the members owning a Web site seems astonishingly low. This is all the more so when it is considered that the EIPC will apparently host a page for their members. At the risk of repeating myself, any company can have a modest permanent presence on the Internet for the cost of less than a half-page advertisement in a technical journal (or the cost of one year's subscription to a trade organisation), so there is little excuse for this lack of interest in cyberpublicity. To boot, if the members are so apparently conservative, one can ask what purpose there is in the EIPC even having a Web site! Inevitably, the third menu item is an invitation to join the EIPC, with the usual information on fees and an application form. The next menu item leads one to three national groups within the Institute, French, Italian and Swiss (in alphabetical order). The only useful thing to say about these pages is that they are incredibly different, ranging from a few lines of text to several pages of publicity. The last graphics menu states "Order IPC Publications" but it leads you nowhere useful, just a dreaded "Under Construction" notice. So one can ask what purpose can this site serve? Not much. I don't think it is likely to attract many new members, even if a potential candidate found it, perhaps by accident. It gives no technical information. Nor does it show much about past and forthcoming events. Even the links it offers are confined to the two other sites reviewed here plus a French suppliers' group ­ and it does not even link into itself: no mail address, no telephone or fax number on the home page. In short, pretty pathetic.

http://www. pcif.org.uk

The PCIF site must have one of the fastest-loading Home Pages ever, fantastic! Its total length is barely 4 kb. Unfortunately, like the last one, it has neither a description nor a meta list of keywords, but it does have a title. This was apparently sufficient for Web Crawler to know of its presence and there were quite a number of sites with links into it appearing when a Web search was done. Clicking from the Home Page into the site was not disappointing, either. The menu page lit up almost as rapidly, with a mere 12 kb to download, including ten different coloured icons with a PCIF logo to break the monotony. All the other pages are equally good for downloading. One of them, entitled "Contact PCIF" gives the full co-ordinates of the organisation, although it may be better to add just the address and phone/fax numbers to the Home Page, as well. There is a page marked "News". On entering it, I found many titillating titles but, unfortunately, these were mostly badly linked and resulted in the famous Error 400. This is a pity, because it mars an otherwise excellent site. There were a few other invalid links, elsewhere. There is not a great deal of technical information on the site, but there are plenty of indications and links where and how to find it. As befits a federation of its type, a great deal of emphasis has been laid on its own organisation and its interaction with its members. It may be that it has, perhaps, outgrown the title Federation because it now seems to have individual member companies and no longer uniquely groups a number of more specialised associations, although this is not entirely extinct. A good number of hyperlinks to various types of organisation are offered. On balance, all things considered, this is quite a good site. A little more effort, particularly in linking, and it should be possible to approach a straight row of 10s in Table I.

Brian Ellisb_ellis@protonique.comCyprus

Table I

	Home	Other	Down
	page	pages	loading
URL	design	design	time	Navigation	Communications	Information	Legibility
http://www.ipc.org (old site)	3	5	3	4	8	10	10
(new site, provisional)	(6)	(6)	(7)	(8)	(9)	(10)	(10)
http://www.eipc.org	6	7	6	8	1	1	9
http://www.pcif.org.uk	8	9	10	6	7	7	10