Content Creation for Pubs

— Published June 6th, 2003  |  by David Moore

UK website eGov Monitor this month reports that nine countryside pubs in England have been outfitted with computers and broadband connections to offer rural residents access to the internet and IT training.

Launching the project, Countryside Agency Chairman Sir Ewen Cameron said: "We will be looking for ways in which rural pubs and communities across the country can access funding to provide such services on a long-term basis."

Aside from all the jokes suggested by this move, it ties in with offering greater accessibility to online services for people with disabilities. With rural communities, the accessibility problems are geographic or economic, while with people with disabilities they may be physical or mental.

But before the online world congratulates itself on such programmes, we need to ask an important question - as we welcome newcomers to the internet, what are we doing to give them sites worth visiting?

Email is still the killer app online- people check their mail before they fire up their browser, and losing your web bookmarks is much less of a disaster than losing all your mail.

And email is not written by people paid to create online content (with the noble exception of certain email newsletters of course). If visiting websites is an afterthought for most people, maybe we're not as great as we thought.

And even when people do visit, it's often like a trip to the dentist's - you know you have to go, but you don't expect to enjoy it. You're booking a flight, trying to find some product information, or checking on celebrity gossip (or maybe that's just me). However, your attempts to get what you need are thwarted by poor usability and bad writing.

Those in the industry might be tolerant of these obstacles - we've often got bandwidth to burn, we're at our machines all day anyway, and we have a lot of internet experience to help us.

However, we should of course be thinking of people without these advantages when we add material to our site, or work on some piece of functionality. Just to get online can be a challenge, and of course as much effort as possible should be put into the technical infrastructure to make the Internet as accessible as possible in every way.

But unless we deliver compelling content that satisfies people's needs, the technical work will have been worthless.

And with computers in pubs now, think how good your site's content has to be to compete with the attractions of a pint of beer and a packet of crisps.