There are some ready-made solutions to the challenge of controlled content:Communities, the newest Web resource for people who want to have multiplesingle-use Web sites, offer a free, secure, and relatively easy way topublish content for a specific audience. Excite, Yahoo, and Tripod all havetheir own versions. While community services vary wildly, they all allowmembers to post pictures for other members to admire or comment upon, put up URLsto favorite community or noncommunity sites, and view the bios of othercommunity members. Also, with varying degrees of success, these servicesmake tasks such as setting up message boards, sharing calendars, andchatting fairly painless.But if you don't want to build a community or you just don't want tolook at all that advertising, there are ways to keep all your content onone Web site while keeping unwanted eyes away from sensitive content.
Out of Site, Out of Mind
The most obvious way to hide something on your site is to simply withhold links. This is what I've done with the invoices I mentioned earlier.This way, people can get to the content only if you give them the URLs with all theappropriate subdirectories. Butpeople have a hard enough time remembering all my home, work, cell, andemail strings without having to remember endlessly long URLs. In myexperience, everyone I've ever sent to a subdirectory got lost.
Happy Easter!
An oddly effective method for keeping goofy material away from therest of an otherwise professional site is to take a page from the gamedesign book: Plant Easter eggs, which are essentially hidden secrets.People love to find Easter eggs,and once they're found, they're easy to remember. Of course, if the bulk ofyour content is hidden behind Easter eggs, you're either going to annoy thehell out of people or win the Daring Design Achievementaward.
Using Easter eggs on a Web site is a simple way to indicate that thecontent is not meant for all viewers. I used to co-host a weekly croquetgame. (Sometimes it sounds as if we Webmonkeys are just making upthese examples rather than living normal well-adjusted lives, doesn'tit?) We kept a hidden page that featured the where-and-when details ofupcoming games. Instead of forcing my friends to bookmark an unlinked pageor memorize the oh-so-tricky file name (croquet.html), I linked the page toa hot spot on a border-free JPEG at the top of my homepage. It was a two-click journey for those in the know. But if an unknown someonejust happened to roll over the 2-pixel-wide hot spot and follow thehyperlink, the lack of obvious links would make it plain to anyone withsocial grace that this event was not open to the entire world. It's likereading a postcard invitation sent to a roommate; it's easily accomplished,but it still doesn't give you permission to crash the party.
With that in mind, here are three typical design "don'ts" that are actually "do's" when you want to herd your visitors toward the correctcorrals:
1. Use teensy, 2-pixel-wide hot spots in an image map. Thistime-honored means of laying an Easter egg works especially well if used inconjunction with an otherwise purposeful image map.
2. Suppress link underlining and use one text color. Set your text,link, vlink, and alink attributes in the <body> tag to the samecolor and thenuse the <style> tag to banish the tell-tale underlines (note: sinceyou can't pick and choose the links that this process affects, do this only on apage that contains no other links):
<style>
<!-- a {text-decoration: none} -->
</style>
3. Set text color of links with the <font> tag to that of thebackgroundcolor. Make sure you use the HTML hex codes for this because some systemsuse different palettes for text colors than they do for background colors,causing green text, for example, to show up against a slightly different greenbackground. You can pick yourcolors by sight or consult a conversion table. But be careful:Technically this is bad HTML because you need to nest the <font> taginside the <a> tag. And browsers that adhere to official HTML 3.2(like early versions of Opera) won't fall for this trick.
Of course, anyone who bothers to view your source will be privy to allyour hidden links. So why use such a shoddy method of obfuscation? Well, goback to the house metaphor and think of these methods as the dwarf-hedgehome-protection system. Sure, a badly pruned 2-foot-tall hedgeoutlining the front border of your property isn't going to keep out thieves(let alone the neighbor's randy pooch), but it will direct themajority of foot traffic down the obvious stone walkway.
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