Gygax on Net!

The Gaming Outpost announce that the featured persona in its newest Listen Up! column is Gary Gygax. The Gaming Outpost ( http://www.gamingoutpost.com/ ) and check out the full article. To link directly, point your browser to: http://www.gamingoutpost.com /features/listen_up/gary_gygax.shtml

Web Page Design for Gamers

I work full time at a website design firm as Art and Marketing director. Besides the sites of other design firms (who feel, perhaps reasonably, the need to do a bit of functional showcasing), we do almost nothing in the way of real (audio/video), shockwave, or the like. The only reason I say 'almost' nothing is because sometimes the customer insists. It's their money, okay, they get shockwave! But it's not because it does them any good at all.

Heck, even downloadable PDFs is a big hurdle for many web deni-zens. "Gee golly, what's a PDF? Download for Free? Wait, it took me to the Adobe site! I'm lost! Help Martha!" It hardly seems to matter how low you set the hurdles, virtually nobody tries jumping them.

The latest stats I've read put RealAudio at about 12% of the browsing public, and Shockwave at about 10%, depending on who you read. But then it is estimated that about 8-10% of the active browsing public are themselves in the field as either designers or vendors of design- or browser-related products.

The similarity in these numbers indicates few if any people outside the hardcore are doing anything with the kinds of plug-ins that might be interesting to you.

We've found that glitzy add-ons are _mostly_ for the entertainment of the site owner and friends and have little to do with content, ease-of-use, and the like. If you want 'em, have fun! Just remember they are for you, or for show, but not really for your customers or viewers.

SGS WEB PAGE IS BIG HIT!

The page titled "This is the Sgs", at http://www.islandnet.com/~citizenx/sgshome.html, was selected as a Links2Go "Key Resource" in the War-games by Title and Series topic, at http://www.links2go.com/topic/Wargames_by_Title_and_Series.

Each quarter, Links2Go samples millions of web pages to determine which pages are most heavily cited by web pages authors, such as yourself. The most popular pages are downloaded and automatically categorized by topic. At most 50 of the pages related to a topic are selected as "Key Resources." Out of 17 pages selected as Key Resources for the Wargames by Title and Series topic, your page ranked 11st. For topics like Music, where there are a large number of interested authors and related pages, it is harder to achieve selection as a Key Resource than for a special-interest topic, such as Quantum Physics.

The Links2Go Key Resource award differs from other awards in two important ways. First, it is objective. Most awards rely on hand selection by one or more "experts," many of whom have only looked at tens or hundreds of thousands of pages in bestowing their awards. Selection for these awards means no more than that one person, omewhere, noticed your page and liked it enough to select it. The Key Resource award, on the other hand, is based on an analysis of millions of web pages. Any group or organization who conducts a similar analysis will arrive at similar conclusions. When Links2Go says your page is a Key Resource, we mean that your page is one of the most relevant pages related to a particular topic on theweb today, using an objective statistical measure applied to an extremely large data set.

Second, the Key Resource award is exclusive. We get literally hundreds of people requesting that their page be added to one or more topics per week. All of these requests are denied. The only way to get listed as a Key Resource is to achieve enough popularity for our analysis to select your pages automatically. We do not accept fees, offers of link exchanges, free advertising, or bartered livestock as inducements to add new sites to our lists. Fewer than one page in one thousand will ever be selected as a Key Resource.

Once again, congratulations on your award!