Corporate.Net workshop The Tools To Smarten Up Your Web Site ODBC Error Code = 37000 (Syntax error or access violation). The name 'Master's' is illegal in this context. Only constants, constant expressions, or variables allowed here. Column names are illegal. Don't let deadlines or assumptions about how your software works let your site visitors see messages like this. Search Tools Contribute to Higher Site IQs Keep in mind that people may not find the flow of information at your Web site intuitive. You may be familiar with what's behind the buttons and choices on your Web pages, but others may not be. Even frequent visitors may need to jog their memories about where you've stored some nugget of information. The solution is to provide a site-specific search engine. A surprising number of Internet Web sites lack a search function, even though some products, such as the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and Simple Web Indexing System for Humans (SWISH), are freely available. Commercial tools--including Digital Equipment Corp.'s AltaVista Private Extensions, Excite's Excite for Web Servers (EWS), InMagic's DB/Text WebServer, Microsoft Corp.'s Microsoft Index Server (MSIS), Netscape Communications Corp.'s Catalog Server, Verity's TopicSearch, and WebGlimpse--are also available. In each case, the search engine's indexer creates and maintains a keyed list of words and phrases that are found in your Web files. The engine itself accepts search arguments from your HTML that it can use to produce a list of URLs. EWS from Excite runs on Unix and Windows NT, and it is a good example of a search engine that's easy to add to an existing Web site. EWS includes a copy of Perl 5 with CGI helper routines and a set of Perl programs, configured through HTML statements, t hat drive the underlying search engine. The engine itself is a pair of programs--Architext Index and Architext Search. Much of your search engine configuration work will involve setting up inclusion and exclusion rules for Web files, which the indexer should process. For example, depending on the content of your site, you may want the indexer to skip image files and certain Web pages. WAIS lets you exclude wild card file names (but not path names), while SWISH lets you exclude image files from the engine's indexing. EWS goes a step further, using simple expressions to identify exclusion criteria. You can exclude Web pages from EWS' indexing based on whether they contain frames. EWS also has a query-by-example (QBE) feature that visitors will appreciate. Other products, such as Catalog Server, the high-end version of TopicSearch and MSIS (to a limited extent), process metatags that you can add to Web files. The metatags let you specify fields in the documents you wish to have indexed--a great fe ature if your documents follow a consistent layout. Discussion Threads Breed Intellect Web site designers often forget to add a capability for discussing the site's content. If a Web designer thinks of publishing on the Web as similar to publishing a book, he or she will overlook the interactive possibilities of the Web. The Web is not a book or magazine. Visitors to your site would rather be participants than spectators. The first indication that people would like to do more than just provide feedback (by sending e-mail to the site's administrator) usually can be found in a discussion of the site's content in a newsgroup. Creating a newsgroup and linking it to the Web site is easy to do, but enabling discussion on the Web pages adds pizzazz. You get direct integration with the site's content--computer-based conferencing--and have control over the site's security. Computer conferencing takes the form of the exchange of ideas through message posts. Typically, each message is a reply to or comment on a previous message. People can learn new information while sharing their knowledge and expertise. You didn't assume your Web site's content would be the last word on the subject, did you? Publishing information is a never-ending p rocess--especially on the Web. Web-based conferencing software includes Allaire Corp.'s Forums, IntraActive's InTandem, Media Machine's Forums.com, Motet Conferencing and Radnet's WebShare. These products let people set up private or public discussion areas, while the creator of a private area designates which users have access.

Internet Rx by Chris Lewis Are NCs Really Worth the Price of Admission by Dave Molta Updated April 8, 1997