They didn’t mention how responsive people would be in the „How to Build a Web Site" book.

They didn’t say that no matter how much time you spent checking links, proofing copy and doing dry runs something was going to be funky.

The smoke is starting to clear now, but some nagging problems are still being addressed. Here are some of the things I learned over the past two weeks:

The AOL factor: It seems like half the mail I got came from America Online users. This made me sad. Not because I dislike AOL, but because the site doesn’t look as nice with the AOL browser. Appearances aside, a couple of the AOL folks reported that the pages were about a character too wide and they had to shift the screen to see the last letter of many sentences. Arrrgggh! I meant to make the page widths for our site fit on the smallest screens out there. I tested them out with Netscape and Internet Explorer and they worked fine. The news pages have been slightly shrunk to alleviate this problem, but it will take some time to go through the entire site.

The lesson: Spend more time testing your site through AOL, seven million users can’t be ignored, no matter what Internet snobs say.

A similar, though unrelated issue, also arose on the links page, only this time it wasn’t AOL users, it was Mac users. It seems that at least one Mac user reported that the links on the Sausage Factory page didn’t work. We’re still trying to figure that one out (since they work on a PC), but perhaps its part of Microsoft’s plan for global domination.

Deliver what you promise: When we started this thing, we promised news updates every day by 10 a.m. When we had trouble logging into out server this past Tuesday, we didn’t publish until noon. Several people, rightfully, e-mailed to ask what the heck was going on.

The great default page caper: Anyone who visited the site the first week got a page that said „Welcome to our Web." After a visit or two, many of these folks, knowing their way around a Web browser, bookmarked the home page so they could avoid the welcome page. Fine so far. But when it came time to ditch the welcome page, I renamed the home page. The result: the poor folks who bookmarked the home page under its old name were still seeing last week’s news. Things should be cleared up now (that old page now has a note on it explaining the mix-up and how to fix it). The lesson: Be more careful.

The lesson in all of this?

Unlike a newspaper, a Web site is never finished.