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The World Wide Web has become an important resource of timely information for the information professional. Unlike previous (traditional) formats of information, especially paper‐based publications, the Web has also brought the concept of electronic publishing within reach of any person who has browser access to this Internet navigator. It therefore implies that the information professional can also take part in the publishing process by creating and maintaining a homepage on the Web. Although a few articles have been published on homepage maintenance by information services, not much has been made available about the requirements for homepage design, or guidelines for the planning and structuring of a complete homepage environment. This article provides a few basic guidelines on homepage design, arguing that the physical appearance of a homepage is similar to that of a good graphical user interface (GUI). In designing a complete homepage file, the premise is that basic hypertext design principles could also be applied in the World Wide Web environment.

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become the most visible application of the Internet. Newspapers and popular magazines publish stories on a regular basis about Web sites. The most ubiquitous symbols of the World Wide Web, its Uniform Resource Locator (URL) addresses, are even becoming commonplace on many television commercials. Over the past few years the World Wide Web (along with client applications like Netscape to assist in navigating the Web) has literally brought the Internet to life and to the attention of the general public.

An exploratory sample of 114 personal home pages, drawn from a home page directory available on the World Wide Web (People Page Directory: http://www.peoplepage.com), was analysed to detect patterns and trends in home page content and design. Covered in the analysis were types of informational content included in the home pages; internal organisation and structure of the content, including type and number of hypertext links; miscellaneous content elements, such as ‘sign guestbook’ and number of hits to the page; and physical design features such as photos, motion and audio elements. Metaphors used in the design of the pages and degree of self‐revelation were also considered. The home pages displayed a great variety of content and of specific types of formatting within broader formatting approaches. While some content elements were quite popular, none of them — not even name — was found on all home pages. Nor did the pages evidence reliance on any single dominant metaphor, such as home page as ‘home’ in the sense of domicile. It appears that though certain features may be frequently found in it, the personal home page as a social institution is still very much under development.

This article reports on a study designed to identify the authors of academic library home pages and to investigate the nature of their training and their use of newly‐acquired Web design skills. The major finding of the study is that librarians more often than non‐librarians are assuming the responsibility for writing home pages for academic libraries in very large public colleges and universities. In addition to professional identity, factors such as length of service to an institution, current job title, and prior education play a role in determining the likelihood that an individual will write the home page for his or her employing library. Learning the skills needed to write a home page requires time for training. Institutional support for training is considered vital and well worth the investment because training is very often disseminated beyond the home page authors. Teaching others Web construction skills is one of the ways library home page authors most frequently apply their newly acquired abilities.

There are two main objectives of the paper. First, in a systematic and statistically rigorous manner, we attempt to descriptively document the types and nature of marketing information on commercial home‐pages, with a view to identifying the major objectives of contemporary commercial Web sites that pre‐dominate the Web. Using Resnik and Stern’s “information content” paradigm, we evaluate the informativeness of commercial home pages. Second, we attempt to empirically examine various important factors of commercial home‐pages that lead to increased visits, or hit‐rates. The identification of hit‐rate determinants is likely to be of great value, both to Web page designers and to the many small and large firms seeking to establish their presence on the Web.

Many libraries are using the Internet's World Wide Web to provide information/or library clients and others. The article begins with a brief discussion of the situation in one country, Iceland, based on a November 1995 questionnaire survey. Among other things, this Icelandic survey looked at library use of the Internet and the ways in which libraries are using the World Wide Web to provide information via a homepage. A larger Nordic study, of which this Icelandic study was part, sets the Icelandic findings in a broader context. To take this further into an international setting content analyses were carried out of the home pages of public libraries and school libraries in 13 different countries. After a short description of the methodology, the results of these analyses are presented Based on this, there is a discussion of the purposes for which a library might create a home page on the World Wide Web and of the information that might be provided through the homepage, depending on the purpose or aim. The final section of the paper deals with issues and problems associated with the creation and maintenance of a library home page.

The purpose of this paper is to identify important principles which should be applied to electronic library websites to make them usable for all people.

The goal of this paper was to make the simplified user interface of Hungarian Electronic Library (VMEK) more accessible and usable by leveraging the latest technologies, standards and recommendations. Vision-impaired and motor-disabled people were also involved in brainstorming and collecting ideas during the design phase and in testing the implemented website.

This paper showed that the perspicuity of the Web page is greatly improved by semantically correct HTML codes, clearly defined links and alt attributes, hotkeys and typographic principles.

The paper presents the design principles of electronic library Web pages which can be applied by Web developers and content managers. The paper identifies design principles, which improve the perspicuity of user interfaces to a great extent (especially in the case of blind users); draws attention to the typographic principles, which promote reading and understanding documents; and recommends guidelines for developing electronic library home pages and managing the content of these home pages.

This paper bridges the gap between the information and library science field and the Web accessibility and usability field. Based on brainstorming results where people with various kinds of disabilities were involved, the paper gives 11 recommendations which should be taken into account while designing and developing electronic library websites to ensure equal access to their services and documents.

The purpose of the research was to compare web site designs used by the fastest growing companies in the USA to the largest companies in the USA and to benchmark those designs against best practices as defined by a leading consultant in the industry.

This approach surveyed the web site designs by each group of companies against a set of best practices and developed summary data about the observations.

The largest companies in the USA used designs that are more consistent with the best practices as defined by a leading consultant in the industry.

The fastest growing companies did not use best practices in their web site design and still maintained very rapid growth as evidenced by their national rankings. A poorly executed design was less of a detractor to the company's success than anticipated. Web site design may have a role (positive or negative) in the company's growth rate but further research is required to understand the scope and nature of the role.

The reason why a company maintains a rapid growth rate may be dependent on numerous factors and as such, a comprehensive evaluation of why a company sustains a rapid growth rate should be undertaken. The role of the web site in the company's success should be evaluated in more depth.

This paper has value for web site designers, entrepreneurs, IT management, IT consultants, and large company personnel involved with web site design.

To date, most published work concerning effective Web site design has been based on personal opinion or experience, not on research. Uses 50 in‐depth interviews with Web site designers to identify key design considerations and online customer conversion and relationship strategies. A proposed model illustrates a direct relationship between Web site design and the online customer conversion process. Relationship marketing, integrated marketing communications, and segmenting, targeting, and positioning should guide both Web site design and customer conversion. Ultimately, a Web site should help to establish, build, and maintain long‐term customer relations. Managerial implications are introduced and discussed.

Only properly designed web sites are accessible to people with print disabilities. The purpose of this paper is to follow up on earlier investigations of this kind by looking at the web sites of all 56 ALA‐accredited library schools, and of the libraries on these campuses.

Bobby 3.1.1 was used to evaluate compliance with major accessible web design guidelines. In addition, key web pages were checked manually for the presence of skip‐navigation components, and the sites' re‐design status was ascertained. The results were presented in the form of basic descriptive statistics, including percentages of Bobby‐approved pages and the average number of barriers per page. Correlations of the current accessibility data with older data sets and with library school ratings were also calculated.

The results indicate that despite an increase in accessibility, only 50 to 60 per cent of the web sites were free of Bobby‐detectable errors. Canadian sites were more accessible than US sites. Contrary to previous findings, recently redesigned sites tended to be more accessible. Highly ranked sites also tended to have higher accessibility scores. US sites showed a random‐like up‐and‐down movement in accessibility status between 2002 and 2006.

The collected data reflect compliance with only a subset of accessible design principles.

More education and continued advocacy is needed to increase web accessibility at libraries and library schools and to help establish library schools as models of program accessibility.

This is the only study that provides trend information about the accessibility of a broader set of library and library school web sites.