URL:         http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/faq/homepage.content.html
Created:     Tue Oct 26 12:00:00 MET DST 1999
Last update: Tue Oct 26 12:00:00 MET DST 1999

FAQ HomePage Content - What's on a HomePage?

Ideas for a nice homepage

Photo

A photo is always a good thing. Don't hide it on one of your other pages - this is the place to show your picture!

The picture should show you. It should be a recent photo. Don't show anyone else. After all, the visitor wants to see you - not anyone else. (Pictures of comic strip figures are not an option here.)

Especially at universities it is nice to be able to be able to match a face with a name. Didn't you always wanted to know the name of the person sitting next to you?

Person Description

Describe yourself!

Visitors want to get to know you. So just try to answer some of the questions you would normally get from people:

Where do you come from and what do you do? What do you do each day? What do you do for a living? What hobbies do you have? WHat are you interested in?

What do you study (major/minor)? Which courses do you take and have taken? What experiences do you have from earlier courses? When is your next talk? Have you written any nice texts or programs? Can you help others setting up and/or using some program? Are you a tutor for some course?

Yes, a CV as a webpage can be nice, too.

It's Your Work!

DO give some info about your texts and pages, your deeds, and your work!

DONT just show copies of work from others. DONT hide your opinion and works on other pages. (Giving links to good stuff is ok, of course.)

Contact Addresses

Give info on how you can be contacted: Email, snail mail, phone, fax, nicknames of ICQ and IRC. Put a mailto link onto every of your pages, so the visitor can tell you about broken links, typos, and other mistakes.

"Last update"

Tell the reader when you made you last vital change to your page. Make changes visible to allow the reader to see them quickly.

Update!

Update your pages when necessary. Old info can be annoying to the reader. Let programs check your links and typography.

BAD Home Pages

Redundancy

Add some of the following sentences:

	"This page is under construction."
	"This page is boring."
	"More on this later."

Under Construction Pictures

AVOID filling pages with "info about no info".

See also: The Kewlest Page

Counters

Add a link to some counter. Make it show ten digit numbers. Use a CGI that runs very slowly on some very remote server. Display every digit as a huge picture.

link collections

Copy large lists of links. Do not structure them. Do not comment them.

Broken links

Add links that go nowhere. Lots of them.

Promises, Promises...

Announce information everybody wants - but dont give it. Tell readers that the content of this webpage does not suffice to hold the solution to Fermat Last Theorem, adds links to the recipe that cures both AIDS and Ebola.

Tickers

Add a ticker tape message to all your pages - it is hard to read and usually gets displayed right over the information that reader do not want to be overwritten in their browsers.

Browser specific pages

Make your pages special - for every browser. Show different content for each one fo them, and exploit every possible bug to make them crash. Provide a completely different for each browser.

Guest Books

Guest books are cool. Anyone can mess with it - and nobody ever reads them. Except people with no life.

<center> und <table>

Use these tags whenever possible. Readers go wild with them.

Remember this...

Webpages are alive! Webpages usually contain some volatile information. Changes in life can have changes on your homepage and you should expect homepages to change with the life of its owner.

Help others! From time to time you spot errors and typos on other people's pages. Let them know about it - and be open enough to correct you own mistakes when others tell you about them! (This is not only about webpages. ;-) Allow your readers to contact you directly, ie with a mailto link on each page. Thanks!