h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi, I have been thinking about the question regarding external links to the h2g2 front page. I agree with everyone who said that links to twitter and Facebook were pointless, especially for those who don't have accounts. I think there definitely should be links to outside, good quality web pages, but that these should be relevant to the particular articles being showcased that week, or that day. High quality relevant links are essential in making a good web page more visible on the web.

My thoughts are that the *whole of the Front Page needs a revamp, as it is muddled and doesn't seem to have a single purposeful introductory statement across the top.
At the very least the first line of the landing page (if using the link from the BBC homepage) ought to read Welcome to h2g2, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, followed by a phrase explaining the purpose of the site.

Also, your pictures/graphics are unlabeled (visible when you hover over them) For instance at the moment there is a photo of Douglas Adams. This should say 'Douglas Adams, writer of etc....founder....


It is great that the Peer Review banner is so prominent, in Brunel and Alabaster, but the very little I know of how search engine spiders read a web page would mean that the 'Peer Review' would take precedence over all the other content? Therefore the Front Page would never come high in a search engine result page, unless one was *searching for Peer Review.

Another peculiarity is the endearing logo which brings you back to the Front Page, in the shape of a twisted h and g. It took me months to realise this was a functional button and even longer to realise it was not just a fancy shape, but an h and a g. It hasn't got a tag when you hover over it.



I am a newcomer here, and I don't mean to be unnecessarily critical, but I would love to see the place better and more widely known. At the moment it seems to be crumbling at the edges and has a slight ambience of decaying elegance.

ps, another thought not entirely unrelated to the Talking Point is that the major search engines don't come up with individual h2g2 articles as often as they should. This is possibly because the articles are not updated frequently enough to score with their algorhythms. Which is a shame, because the EG entries are often of a higher calibre than a lot of stuff you can read on the web.



Lanzababy

(On the subject of search ratings, see the Search Robots section of A36186924)

thank you for that link Alex. It explains *how the articles don't appear in search results. - because of the nofollow meta tag. But I don't understand why the search robots would be crushing and slow down the h2g2 site.


Is there a case of archiving some really old unused bits of the site, or has this got nothing to do with the 'crushing' problem of the robots.



fast before I get lynched

I couldn't tell you - it's one of those technical matters that only a true could fully understand.

I suspect that the problem is the number of robots. They read every bit on every page and download every image every time.

When the network connection to the ISP is sized, the techie will guess something like, for example, about 1500 visits/day where each visitor will go to five pages, at about 400K/page (on average) meaning 3Gigs of data a day. Allow for a bit extra for peaks and all is fine.

If 5000 robots come through and read every page every 24 hours and there are 6000 pages in the complete website (again at an average size of 400K) that increases your ISP data charges by 4000 times (12000G).

The computers can probably handle the load but the company probably cannot handle the network charges.