The Virtual Swamp, or Navigating the Web Without a Map

Meta
Title:	The Virtual Swamp, or Navigating the Web Without a Map
Creator:	T'Mar
Date(s):	March 2004
Medium:	online
Fandom:	multi
Topic:
External Links:	The Virtual Swamp, or Navigating the Web Without a Map, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The Virtual Swamp, or Navigating the Web Without a Map is an essay by T'Mar.

The essay was linked at Essays: Rants and Rambles and was a submission for The Fanfic Symposium.

Excerpts

There have been some excellent columns recently on how fast things proceed on the Internet. And on the one hand that is good, because one can find pictures, screen caps, quotes, episode reviews, etc., pretty quickly. On the other hand, it can also be pretty annoying. Websites appear and disappear with wild abandon, it seems. One really has to spend hours on the Net to keep up with the changes.

I realise that it's not always feasible to have one all-inclusive archive for fanfic and other stuff. That's fine. But when people make it incredibly difficult to find anything to read, I'm sure you will empathise with my annoyance. I mean, how difficult is it really to separate Star Trek stories into Classic, TNG, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise sections? How difficult is it to actually show the pairing featured in the story? A rating? A summary? I'm not saying that I want to be warned about every little thing. I mean, asking to be warned about a character cutting his hair seems to me to be taking warnings to the absurd. And if I want to know if a character dies, I can always just scroll to the end and take a peek (I started doing this with fanfic after reading a Smallville story that traumatised me - and yes, I do read the last page of paper novels, too). But would writing a short summary really be that difficult? Come on, even novels have plot summaries or vague details printed somewhere on the jacket or the back. You can't judge a book by its cover, but you might get interested based on the summary. In the same way, you can't judge a story by its title (especially with stories that answer challenges to write fanfic based on Star Trek or X-Files episode titles) but you can by the summary.

By all means, make your site fancy. Use frames, style sheets, pictures, whatever. Just make it user-friendly. You don't want people giving up in disgust because they had no idea how to navigate your site. And people who use pictures that are incredibly large in terms of file size are guilty, too. An average-size picture of about 400 by 600 pixels does not need to be 120k! And don't have a page of 'thumbnails' that aren't thumbnails at all, but the large pictures just set smaller on the page. That's defeating the object! Not everyone uses their phone line for free. For me, page loading time is a factor. I pay for every second I'm on the phone. Which means that when I go to a site that first has to load every advert and picture before the actual content of the site, I get angry and frustrated. Yes, I might be interested in your site, but make getting to the "meat" of it a mission, and I won't be interested for very long.