Design and Architecture of a Content-Rich Web Site

Background and History

"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." George Santayana

I started doing Web development in 1993, at NASA/GSFC. This was the year that many people became aware of the World Wide Web thanks to NCSA's Mosaic for X. Although it was by no means the very first Web browser, it was relatively easy to install, and it illustrated — graphically — how people could easily and cheaply publish material almost instantaneously to a world-wide audience.

The next year, I left GSFC to become a Web consultant. The 'hotlist' (bookmarks) I developed while at NASA became "The CyberWeb", which evolved into WDVL. This was the first Web developer site to be supported commercially by banner ads, and eventually the revenue from them exceeded what I was getting as a consultant, so I stopped consulting to concentrate on WDVL.

I developed WDVL for 5 years, and then decided to move on. I wanted to explore the possibilities of a more general site, and the emerging xHTML specification. Thus, EncycloZine was born.

The decision to build a non-trivial Web site is usually based on a perceived demand or utility value, rather than the desire to simply explore some new technology — that can usually be done with much less than a full-scale site. Indeed, EncycloZine was primarily motivated by a wish to expand my subject matter well beyond Web development. However, the opportunity to move my focus from legacy technologies (such as classic HTML) to emerging technologies (such as XML) certainly provided much of the impetus to embark on building a new site.

So, was it going to be a personal site, or a commercial one, or what? Well, at the beginning I hoped that after a year or two of development, it would be possible to 'cash in' on my efforts and make some money, perhaps by banner ads or affiliate programs (the Internet Dream). However, as you probably know, CPM's ain't what they used to be... there's little money to be made unless your site has traffic in the millions! I tried affiliate programs, but frankly I don't do store windows too well. For now, EncycloZine is a hobby and portfolio item, and probably will remain so. We'll see.

The first question to answer in designing a new Web site is invariably, Who is our target audience? We decided that the audience was to be us, our children, teachers, students, and enquiring minds. That is, the site's primary purpose was to be educational, and we wanted it to be fun as well. Not only would we fill it with 'academic' material, but we would also offer various diversions such as optical illusions, games, puzzles, quizzes, and a gallery of art, space, etc, etc. That we have succeeded in reaching this audience is demonstrated by the fact that our traffic drops to about half during school vacations!

I sometimes used to refer to WDVL as "an encyclozine of Web development technology", meaning that it tried to be encyclopedic, and that it was an online e-zine. We decided to adopt the name for the new site, and actually create a general-topic small encyclopedia. Now as you can probably imagine, creating an encyclopedia is a massive task requiring months, or even years, of work. However, we didn't intend to compete with the likes of Britannica. The idea was to let the site grow by covering topics at a very high level initially, and filling in lower levels as the years went by. We wrote some material ourselves, and also hired a number of freelance writers. We bought various encyclopedias (books and CDs) for reference and checking submitted articles, and photo and clip-art collections to help illustrate them, and we scoured the Web for free stuff, and public-domain and open content articles and media.

Separation of Concerns - Page 2