by Robert M. Reed

After careful reconsideration of the effect it has had on my career, I can't recommend running a science web site to anyone who is planning a serious career in academia.

0) You have to get out and submit your site at various places like Yahoo, Excite, other people's Earth Science sites, etc. or nobody will ever know you are around.

1) First and foremost decide what kind of site it's going to be. Do you want to deal strictly with research-level science or to you want to provide information at an undergraduate or general public level? Trying to do more than one of these can create serious time, presentation, and tone problems [my site is a fine example of this].

2) Abstracts don't work well for linking figures. I found it hard to make rational links to figures from within abstracts. Most figures required additional text to be understandable.

3) Poster sessions can convert well to web presentations.

4) A web site is a huge time commitment. The pictures are the worst part. Scanning them in, cleaning them up in Photoshop, waiting for them to load.
Maintaining external links is also a huge time sink, especially if you go out looking for new ones. I am in the process of getting rid of external links as much as possible
Trying to get the page to look just right can kill hours. Fancy stuff is deadly, I don't want to think how many hours I spent trying to (unsuccessfully) set up a counter [it just doesn't fly on my server].

5) Figure out page and site layout before you start. Take some time to plan the page order, cross-links, and subfolders for file organization. Take some time to standardize stuff before you start.
Example: I suggest standardizing file and image names in some way, like all lowercase letters. This is especially important for case sensitive operating systems. I spent a lot of time correcting link addresses from '"'something.gif'"' to '"'something.GIF'"'.

6) Rick Nelson once sang:
It's all right now,
I've learned my lesson well
You can't please everyone,
you've got to please yourself.

This applies to foremost to backgrounds, colors, and other visual stuff, but it works for content, tone, and organization as well.

7) For a lot of people, science and humor don't mix or bond or even have a stable equilibrium point. Stuffy bastards. ''Rob's Granite Page'' and ''The Self-Promoting Part of Rob's Granite Page" are the sort of things that they don't appreciate.

8) I wish that I'd never gone out and checked for other people linking to my page.

9) The blink option in Netscape is evil (and gone forever).

10) The more pages you have, the more likely people are to just give up and E-mail you with their question.