Unfinished Business

It's much like the dreaded Good Times virus, an old Internet joke and a recurring nightmare for corporate e-mail systems. You get a note, Subject: Good Times, which says in effect, "Warning, an e-mail virus is common on our system. It comes in a note entitled, 'Good Times,' and it will wreck your computer. Quick! Forward this note to everyone you care about. Protect your friends and your company."

And when a few thousand readers have read the warning and send it back to you, Subject: Good Times, that steel trap between your ears understands that you've been had.

That's the feeling you get when you click a promising link and find another page "Under Construction." Most people don't hit that sign more than twice before they decide not to drive around in that neighborhood.

On the Internet, ideas spread quickly. Some early web spinner considered everything he wanted his site to be and meticulously arranged all the icons and links on the home page. Once in 20 concepts he mustered the energy to build the next page. All those error messages were more than he could stand. Then, it hit him: UNDER CONSTRUCTION! Yea, that's the ticket! One page to cover all the unfinished links, with a barrier, street signs, the works!

Now, site after site promises more than it can deliver but lets you place the order anyway. That "Under Construction" worker sets up house in your cache and threatens to burn his little yellow sign into your screen.

The Internet holds a wealth of knowledge, but this Under Construction thing makes it look like a rogues' gallery of unfinished business and good intentions. When my corporation started its intranet, a widespread opinion was that every department should have a home page link and a starter home page. That would have been a stumpy web indeed, with 50 deadends diluting the effectiveness of five or 10 great features.

You don't write a table of contents and try to build a book around it. The table of content and index are the last pages built! The inventors of this technology had the right idea; every browser defaults to a file named "index.html."

Here's how I work a web. I write this article, load it on the server, look at it, change it, and when it's finally good enough, I add a link to the home page, or wherever I want you to find it. It takes about as much time to print a page as it does to change it and park it on the web.