3. How to make use of Internet for your Organization
3.1 Find information from Internet
- Search the FAQ first and see if you can find your answer
there.
- FAQ at cs.cuhk.edu.hk
- FAQ at sunsite.ust.hk
-
hypertext FAQ at ohio-state
-
usenet FAQ at rtfm.mit.edu
- Search the related links from some search servers such as
-
"Net search"
in netscape buttons.
- Yahoo and
Alta Vista .
-
WWW Index Server for Hong Kong
- Post the question in some corresponding usenet newsgroups
and see if other netters can help you. Make sure you have
read the newsgroup
FAQ berfore your post it. After you get
the answer from some netters, please cancel your post
article; otherwise your post article will still continue to
propagate to other sites and therefore, you will still
continue to receive replies from netters.
- Send mail to your friends and see if they have encountered
your problem before. Ask them to give you some hints to
slove your problem.
3.2 Put your information on Internet
- Construct your home page and then announce its address in related
newsgroups and make it register on some popular web pages such as
WWW Servers in HK ,
HK Government & Related Organisations
or Yahoo .
- Set up your own ftp and gopher servers to house your information if possible.
- Put your organization information or even query form on your web pages. E.G.
Search name files or
HK Government Information Centre
Search
- Polish your web page, ftp and gohper service so as to attract your target
audiences. Try to organize your material as structured as possible. Hence
your audiences can find out your organization information easily. It should help
you to reduce your department enquiry loading from the public. E.G.
Hong Kong School Directory
- Besides just putting your department information and query form on your web pages,
you may also
put some useful tools and interesting materials on your web pages such as
free Internet fax service or Internet technical tips. This kind of materials may
help you to increase
the hit rate of your web pages. Once your web pages have high hit rate, you may
put some government messages on your web pages such as campaign against drugs.
- You may also announce your organization activities, functions or programme in
some related newsgroups, says the monthly programme of City Hall Theatre.
Points to note when you construct your home pages for your organization
- Good Navigation
- Do not put too much hyperlinks on your web pages because your audiences may
get lose in these hyperlinks and cannot get back to your homepage. Adding
some menu bar or [prev|Next] buttons at the top or at the end of each web pages may
help your audiences to browse your web pages in a systematic way.
- Provide feedback channel
- Put your contact e-mail address, feedback form or guestbook on your web pages so
that your audiences can give your feedback, question or comment on your services.
- Provide FAQ for your new audiences
- Compile a FAQ about your organization and put it on your web pages so that new
audiences can get the general information of your organization quickly from your FAQ.
- Provide search engine for your audiences to search for your organization information
- It can help your audiences to find out your organization information easily according
their needs
- Highlight your new items
- Whenever you have updated your web pages with some new items, you should highlight
them on your front page so as to catch the attention of your old audiences.
- Update your web pages frequently
- As the activities of internet are so dynamic, you need to update your web pages
frequently; otherwise your hyperlinks on your web pages will not be valid.
See the example at
White House ,
Netscape and
HK GIC
See some web features demo here
3.3 Keep in touch with your target audiences
- Put the your e-mail addresss, feedback form, guest book, questionnaire, or
polling form on your web pages
so that your audiences can have different channels to give you
their feedback, question or comment on your services.
- Provide mailing list for your audiences to subscribe so that you can
keep in touch with these subscribers via e-mail.
- If your organization have enough audiences to support your services,
you may even create newsgroup for your services, such as
can.gov.general or
misc.immigration.canada
If you want to create newsgroups under hk. and let other news server in HK to
share these newsgroups, you need to following the procedures stated in
hk-newsgroups.rfc
-
3.4 Monitor your web pages access rate
- If you can access your web server log file, you can measure the hit rate of your
web documents. EG
Check out who had accessed your documents in this month or
which documents requested
most. This statistical
data can help you to understand your audiences reading habits and
hence also help you to refine
your web documents. If you cannot access your web server log file, you may
add a web page counter
on your web pages to count the number of access.
3.5 Broadcast your messages on the net
- Posting news should be one of the most effective ways to broadcast your messages.
However, make sure that you post to the right newsgroups. E-mail broadcast is not recommended
unless you are sure that your recipients are very interested in your messages.
3.6 Current Government Internet Development in other countries
