You can plan to receive visitors to your page, and even encourage them by the keywords you place at the top of your html files. The search engines around the world will incorporate references to your web pages into their indexes according to the top 16 to 32 words you put in the title area of your web pages and in the first words of the page itself. Researchers at our university have a unix server account as a place to work via Windows Telnet and as a point of dissemination for their findings, papers and work-in-progress. They also use their own web pages for establishing and building global networks with other academics and professionals in their subject specialism. Especially for Glass Net I have begun this process on behalf of the art glass community, using page on the web as a central location and noticeboard to act as a catalyst for cooperation across the world.
Here are a few points that I feel encourage this exchange when you include them in your web page:-
Put keywords at the top, such as "glass".
Provide some translations of keywords into European languages.
There are 15 official languages in the European Community:
| DA | Danish |
| DE | German |
| EL | Greek |
| EN | English |
| ES | Spanish |
| FI | Finnish |
| FR | French |
| GA | Irish |
| IS | Icelandic |
| IT | Italian |
| LE | Letzebuergesch |
| NL | Dutch |
| NO | Norwegian |
| PO | Portuguese |
| SE | Swedish |
Provide a navigation toolbar if the structure is complex.
Contents
lists are useful and you could even provide a local search engine which
looks only within your account or site.
Provide a full postal and visitor address and remember to add the name of your own country. Your audience is global on the web and may even need to be told where your country is located on the world map.
Provide a clickable email link and show your email address in full for those who cannot mail direct from their browser.
Update and maintain your site regularly, showing dates of updating.
Keep graphics simple yet distinctive.
Go out and use the page yourself on different machines and via diferent search engines. I have found that AppleMacs, Sun Workstations and PCs treat web pages very differently. The range of browsers out there, too, is growing and they treat your pages differently.