David Fine reflects on the passion that underpins successful online endeavours.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Choruses from The Rock,
TS Eliot
Last month the broadsheets reported that 80% of computer users said they spent too much time in front of their machines. Maybe this is what Eliot had in mind seventy years ago, long before Türing?s first electronic computers. More immediately why do we need more websites with more information when we are already reporting overload?
Arts information websites are sites about the arts that aren?t the arts themselves ? a virtual palimpsest from circus to sculpture. Their success doesn?t merely rest on data. For arts information websites to become more than information we?d willingly lose, everyone involved needs to be encouraged to release passion, for what else is the purpose of the arts?
Thinking about It
Passion alone usually leads to trouble, and most endeavour best succeeds with a plan: so websites require research, both before and after their launch. Too often preliminary work with arts information websites is done either poorly or not at all. Time, money and heartache are to be saved if three questions are asked of any website at any stage of its development. Their asking helps it to flourish and evolve.
- Are there up to six things it does that no other site does, or does nearly as well?
- Is this website really wanted ? not just now, but in at least three years? time?
- Has your organisation the capacity to run the site, not just commission it?
Finding the answers requires research, both of the market and the organisation. If the answers fail to stack up positively, breathe a deep sigh of relief and forget it. In the Heinlein deserts of Hyperspace, too many wrecked information sites gather pixelated dust due to inadequate research. A paramount training need for arts information websites is how to research a web design brief, including maintenance and content management.
Setting it up
Still game? The list of up to six unique services will indicate the sort of site you need. If just one service, say an individual artist, a simple HTML site will usually do. More than three services, then a database driven content management system and possibly user-generated content come into play. Stop at six, as other things may be added later: websites evolve.
To help compose a design brief, it is worth developing a metaphorical heuristic of how your organisation?s website will operate. This can range from a filing cabinet to a jungle ? anything is possible in hyperspace. I tend to see websites as shops where the only thing you can buy is newness. This means the organisation constantly has to update the site to ensure customers return, as well as being customer friendly and to some extent customer driven. It also means that a website isn?t a project, something that comes and goes. It is a commitment to provide a service, which in an arts information website is an encouragement to release passion.
At this point it is probably worth engaging with a wider circle. Post a proposal web-page, and talk to people behind sites you?d like yours to be like ? they tend to be very helpful. All this should mean that failure should only come from unpredictable sources, rather than a want of research and planning.
Running the beast
A great web design, now launched, but what happens next? Nothing, if no resources are allocated to content generation and management. Good design should ease the editors? and users? lives, but the site still takes time to run. Ideally design and operation ought to be phased so that the site can evolve. Websites aren?t static like books or brochures, fixed once printed. The way its content is managed moves it closer to ? or further away from ? its community. What community? To encourage the release of passion, an arts information website must remind its users of their desires. The kindling of shared desires and passions defines an online arts community.
http://www.lit-net.org was conceived in 1995 as a virtual literature centre for the West Midlands. It went live in 1997, was redesigned in 2001 and now runs to 3,000 visitors a week. It is much more than an events listing, although it helps raise and sustain audience figures; and it is much more than news and opportunities, comment and opinion. It is a place where people come to share their love of literature, and thereby catch that poetry reading they?d otherwise miss. The task is to develop something that people want to come back to. 80 per cent of web traffic arrives from other sites; most content on lit-net is available elsewhere; visitors return each week because it is clearly displayed, regularly updated, refreshingly presented, and perhaps most important, felt to be owned by them. There have been no overnight solutions. It has taken eight years with an annual budget of less than a part-time p.a. It puts into context the overriding importance of working out what to do after a website is launched, which all too often is inadequately considered at the planning stage.
?Where would you rather be than right here, right now?? were the immortal words of Marv Levy, Coach of the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills, to encourage people to the ballgame. At an interview for a prospective website co-ordinator, ask them to write fifty words that will bring people to your organisation?s website. That is what they have to do week-in and week-out. And curiously enough, to succeed, that?s all they really have to do.
David Fine is a writer working on schemes ranging from Dirty Van Poetry with THE pUBLIC, to a screenplay commissioned by EM-Media from The Executioner?s Art, his thriller published by Tindal Street Press. He is co-ordinator of http://www.lit-net.org.
For a good example of an arts information website driven by passion and desire, go to http://www.liveartmagazine.com. Arts information website managerial policy and practice are detailed in ?Hooked, engaging people in literature?, published by Audiences Yorkshire in 2004.