How would you sum-up the content of your site?
My site provides information and resources about Gilbert Keith Chesterton. It includes some pictures and copies of some of his books, essays and poems. At the moment, there are eight full-length books and nine shorter works, four black and white photos, and a fairly complete bibliography. Elsewhere on the site is a collection of my papers on Program Transformations.

What kind of people do you think visit it?
Anyone who is interested in G.K.Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, the Inklings, Victorian literature, distributionist politics ....

Do you have any idea of the numbers of people visiting?
There have been nearly 6000 requests for the  gkc directory in the last seven months; traffic has been growing steadily, with 563 new hosts served in the last week.

What kind of feedback do you get from visitors?
About 30 people have written in with praise and compliments. Several people have asked if I can find a quote for them -- I can often find it by searching the books I have online. One person asked if I could complete a Chesterton quote which he needed for a crossword! (The AltaVista web search engine found it for me  :-) )

What motivates you to put in the hard work necessary to maintain a site like yours?
See above....  :-)

What have you learned from your experiences with the site?
Concentrate on content rather than flashy graphics : keep your page design simple, with a standard header and footer. This will make it easier for your customers to find their way around. If the result doesn't look good on your browser, complain to the author of the browser!
Don't use background GIFs : they just make the text harder to read. I have never seen an "animated GIF" that wasn't merely irritating! For my pictures, I scanned them at the highest resolution I could, using full 24-bit colour, and then used image processing software to scale down by 50% and convert to JPEGs. The original 4mbyte TIFF file compressed down to about 40K, these download quickly and look very good.
Crop out as much background as possible : it is annoying to spend several minutes downloading a huge GIF file which is mostly sky and grass! All the main browsers can handle JPEG files, and these are much better for photos.

What other sites do you find interesting and/or like?
There are some good sites with Christian books. There are a couple of excellent C.S.Lewis and Tolkein sites: but with no books on them, due to copyright restrictions  :-(
Project Gutenberg is doing an excellent job of collecting out-of-copyright books (on all subjects) and making them available electronically.
The Juggling Information Service is a very well organised site.
See the links on my home page for their URLs.

How do you see Web sites developing over the next five years?
I think we will see a lot more commercial organisations getting onto the Web, with lots of flashy graphics, Java scripts etc., but probably not a lot of content...   :-(
Web-browsers may become almost as ubiquitous as TVs and videos over the next five to ten years.
A trend that the people at Project Gutenberg have noticed is that although the number of people jointing the Internet is growing very quickly, the number of people willing to volunteer to put something back (eg. by proof-reading a book or whatever) is only growing slowly. This is rather sad : either people are getting more selfish, or the Internet is becoming more commercialised.

Do you have plans to develop your own site dramatically?
I will continue to make available all the Chesterton works I can get my hands on, but I expect it will be a steady development rather than a dramatic explosion.

 [INDEX] [INTRO] [REVIEWS] [LINKS] [CULTURE] [MAGAZINE] [GUESTVIEW]