This is the sixth in a series of monthly essays on the business implications of Internet technology. Feedback on these essays is highly appreciated. The focus of the essays is on how technology can be applied in business. In addition, I like to think about the implications for the stock prices of companies such as Netscape. July's essay discussed Intranets. For an index of my occasional writing on Web technology and business, going back to July 1994, see Business and Economic Issues.

With [product X] it is possible to build and populate a Web site of hundreds or even thousands of pages in a matter of hours.

If product X sounds like exactly what you are looking for, then you might need to consider whether you are designing your site from the user's perspective. How can the users possibly absorb thousands of pages of information shoveled at them by you and product X?

The user's motto is, "Please use a filter, not a shovel!" We want to find useful information quickly and intuitively. The way to help us is to provide good organization, with simple, rapid interfaces.

An old-fashioned table of contents is an excellent filter. Back in the early days of the Web, the front page on a site often was a plain outline of the information contained in the site. Compared to the "cool" navigation maps, Java applets, and frames that can be shoveled at browsers nowadays, the text outline still gives more satisfaction to the typical user.

A user wants to know "what's here and what isn't here" as quickly as possible. Before you finalize the design of your site, have a focus group of users go through it and see how well they navigate. If they cannot tell from the first screen what your site contains and where to find it, your design needs more work. Making them guess is not a good approach. Moreover, it ought to be a crime to allow a user go through several clicks only to find a page that says "under construction."

A Web publishing tool is designed to hide the HTML process from the author and make it easier to shovel out content. In contrast, with a Web scripting tool, the author usually is very deep into HTML code, which gets embedded into the script. The script is designed to send users only what is appropriate to them. As a simple example, our Homebuyer's Fair main page uses a script to avoid sending the moving ferris wheel graphic to people using certain browser software, because that software creates annoying flickering in the status bar whenever such graphics are downloaded.

The major search robots are shovels. They indiscriminately produce countless pages that they deem "relevant" to a simple query. Nobody really has time to then go and wade through the results. What the user would prefer is to be pointed to pages by an editor who is expert within a particular niche. If your company has an expert in a given area, that expert would be a great person to write a monthly column on what your Intranet has to offer on that topic.

Frame interfaces appeal to developers, because they permit the site builder to shovel lots of material onto a page at once. Yet frames are a user-hostile interface in nearly all of their implementations. It is just downright difficult to read and interact with a screen that's broken up into sections. Instead of placing your menu obtrusively in a frame, consider suing a pull-down menu at the bottom of the page. We chose this approach because we liked the way it worked on other sites. Incidentally, a pull-down menu is another example of a script. (For more on scripts, see last month's essay on LiveWire.)

Nicholas Negroponte, the author of Being Digital, likes to use the example of a 25-cent newspaper with hundreds of pages. Would you pay more for a bigger newspaper? No, Negroponte says. He would pay more for a smaller newspaper, that only had the information and columns he wants. In Negroponte's words, "Less is more." That is a valuable principle to keep in mind when building a Web site.

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