The basics of ZATZ online publishing
You see, once you go online, all new vistas open up. All new requirements also seem to wind up demanding attention.
Managing back issues online
For example, if you have an online publication, there's no reason you can't have back issues available as well. Anyone who comes to your online publication some months into its life should be able to easily look at issues that have come before.
With a print publication, obviously, that's not possible because you have to, at the very least, mail those back issues to someone, someone is going to have to pay for them, and so forth. So, if we were going to do an online publication -- and we were going to make back issues available -- we had to figure out some way of managing the existence of the back issues and how they related to the current issue.
Keeping things fresh, keeping them coming back
Another facet of online publishing can be loosely described as the fickleness of your audience. In reality, Web audiences are about as loyal as they are to television programs. But they still have the ability to forget about you and your publication. What this means is that you need to make available new, fresh information regularly to keep them coming back to your Web site and checking in. You also need a way to remind them to come back to your Web site as well.
We decided to do a weekly tip mailing and an issue announcement. To make this work, we’d capture people's names when they came to the site and then send them a mailing when a new issue came out. We’d do this issue announcement mailing on a monthly basis so that they'd be told when the new issue was online. We’d also send a short tip each week, so we’d be visible to them on a weekly basis.
We also chose to create a Daily News Page that would provide industry news related to the topic area of a given publication. We’d make that information available every day so that readers who were very interested in a topic would come back on a daily basis to see what's happening. In fact, now, in 2003, we regenerate the news pages for all publications, automatically, every single hour.
"Even the articles themselves proved to be a challenge..."
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Each of these “features” added to the complexity of producing the HTML. Doing a Daily News Page meant that, on a daily basis (and now, hourly), we were going to have to create the HTML to make the News Page work. While there’s technically only three pages of news per publication, the potential for an error in an HTML tag (the elements that make up the syntax of the HTML computer language) went up by a considerable percentage. Instead of having to produce an issue once a month and do all the error-checking on a monthly basis, we now had to produce pages every single day and do all the cross-checking on a daily basis.
Even the articles themselves proved to be a challenge...
How articles should be presented online
About the time that we were looking into this process, I went online to read a rather famous Web magazine called Slate (run by Microsoft). I started reading one of their articles. It was an interesting article, but I didn't have time to complete the article in one sitting. Unfortunately I'd gotten about 3/4 of the way down the page of this article, which was really the equivalent of four or five magazine pages, and it was time for me to stop. I had no way of bookmarking at the exact place where I had left off because Web browsers only bookmark on a page basis, they don't let you create a bookmark partially through a Web page.
It became apparent to me that we were going to have to break each article into smaller chunks that we would call pages. We’d then have to link the first page, second page, third page, and so forth so that you could go from Page 1 to Page 2 or from Page 2 back to Page 1 again. This necessitated an entirely new aspect of HTML programming which would involve all of the cross-reference and back-reference links between all the pages.
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