Some presentations and materials created while at National Ocean Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is in turn part of the Department of Commerce.
NOAA Mosaic/WWW Workshop program, June 13-14, 1995 (PDF, 1 MB)
Program for NOAA’s first conference on the World Wide Web. As an historical note, Mosaic was the name of the first personal computer web browser with a graphical interface.
NOAA WebShop 96 program, June 26-28, 1996 (PDF, 1.9 MB)
Program from NOAA’s second conference on the World Wide Web. Progress! We stopped thinking of “Mosaic” as a separate technology.
NOAA Websites 1995 (“NOAA Internet Information Servers”), dated April 19, 1995.
Listing of NOAA “Internet Information Servers” as of April 1995. The name should tell you something: senior IT management was convinced that the Web was a fad, and declared we had “information services” to make sure the Web was not a prominent focus.
NOAA Websites 1996 (“National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Internet Information Servers”)
Still not convinced the World Wide Web was more than a temporary fad, NOAA continued to list website as “information servers.” On the plus side, the Gopher and FTP servers dropped off the listing.
Lawrence I. Charters, “”Web Analytics and Site Design,” NOAA WebShop 2007, November 14, 2007 (PDF, 2.7 MB)
Presentation on the interaction between a website and good website metrics. While the World Wide Web was halfway through its second decade, many web sites were designed by network administrators, and they tended to dump everything in a large, undifferentiated pit. Getting useful statistics out of such sites was impossible. The key to good stats: having themes, and structuring sites around themes.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Web Statistics: You Got Questions, We Got Numbers,” October 28, 2009 (PDF, 15.6 MB)
You can learn a lot about a website by looking at the web logs, especially if you venture beyond raw hits and start looking at structural and thematic trends. Hits are good, but you get more hits with proper structure and metadata.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Want More People to Know About (and Find) Your Website?“, October 27, 2010 (PDF, 12.4 MB)
Search engines are blind. Accordingly, you need to use accessibility features in your websites to tell not only the blind that a photo of a bird is a photo of a bird, but also tell Google and Bing that it is a photo of a bird.
Abstract: If you took the time to build a website, chances are that you want people to be able to find it and use it. The World Wide Web is built entirely from links, so having links to and from your site is key to increasing its visibility. But even more important is content: Publishing information that is useful, accessible, and current is the most important thing you can do to make your site better known. Following government standards for websites is, surprisingly, another key factor in making your website known as these standards and policies are directly linked to accessibility and visibility. Content and accessibility are, in turn, the foundations for getting prominent ranking on Web search engines. There are also some simple, old-fashioned steps that anyone can take to turn a website address into an electronic advertisement for an office program and mission.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Summer 2011 National Ocean Service Web Workshop: Free Web Tools,” July 2011 (PDF, 11.8 MB)
A review of free tools for looking at websites and web pages for various structural problems, thematic issues, spyware, how sites are built, auditing web sites for proper function, and other useful things.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Summer 2011 National Ocean Service Web Workshop: The Modern Web,” July 2011 (PDF, 13.7 MB)
Quick overview of how rapidly the world has been digitized and put up on the web, and how a site should be built in order to separate your quality content from the random junk put up by the riffraff. There is also an understated theme showing how compliance with federal web policy helps make sites more accessible and reliable.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Summer 2011 National Ocean Service Web Workshop: Page Construction,” July 2011 (PDF, 4.1 MB)
A presentation pushing for the adoption of XHTML. While this is now outdated because of advances in standard HTML, the foundations of modern web technology can be found in the structured nature and syntax of XHTML. This presentation focuses on page elements, rather than the site as a whole.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Summer 2011 National Ocean Service Web Workshop: Web site construction — Site-wide,” July 2011 (PDF, 31.3 MB)
Presentation on how page-level elements and good site structure contribute to a more accessible, indexable site.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Collaborating With Friends — Creating Internet Sites with Google Sites,” September 25, 2012; October 9, 2012.
Abstract: NOAA has a new tool for sharing information across program offices and line offices. Google’s cloud-based Sites technology allows you to build Web sites that can be shared with a project group or with all of NOAA, without any specialized software or complex training. During the presentation, a new site will be built from scratch, using just a Web browser.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Google Analytics Part 1: Getting started with measuring web traffic,” February 20, 2014 (PDF, 4.4 MB)
Abstract: Google Analytics is the world’s most popular service for analyzing website usage. Google Analytics can provide webmasters, content providers, and program and project managers easy-to-use, browser-based tools for examining website traffic, discovering where visitors come from, what they looked at, and what topics they found of interest. In Part 1 of this presentation, two topics will be covered: an overview of what Google Analytics offers and how you can share that information with interested parties, and then an overview of how to set up a NOAA site to use Google Analytics. The presentation is open to program managers, communications specialists, technical specialists, and people who just want a warm place to sit.
This presentation features lots and lots of ducks.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Google Analytics Part 2: What is it, and what it is not,” February 27, 2014 (PDF, 18.4 MB)
Part 2 of the presentation, explains what Google Analytics does well, and what it does significantly less well. No ducks. (Or at least, far fewer ducks.)
Lawrence I. Charters, “Web Metrics for Managers: Reading Behind the Numbers,” May 28, 2015. (Also June 4, 2015)
Abstract: With the advent of websites and social media, government programs, for the first time, have the ability to interact with the public on a massive scale. But communicating the scope and breadth of that interaction is both art and science. Managers need to know how to ask the right questions, and communications and technical staff need to offer answers that are both illustrative and thoroughly marinated in the context of the mission. In this presentation, you will learn the basics behind some metrics used to explore the National Ocean Service website and social media, how to calculate these metrics for your own office website and social media accounts, and then how to weave these into a story for your office that you can use to strengthen your online communications. About the speaker: Lawrence Charters is the National Ocean Service representative to the NOAA Web Committee, and serves as the NOS Internet Projects Manager. He is a huge fan of numbers that paint pretty pictures.
A colleague found a rather rumpled copy of the flyer after eight years.
Lawrence I. Charters and Jennifer Coletta, “Ground control to Major Tom: Ensuring your information is more than an Internet oddity.” February 18, 2016.
Abstract: This presentation will feature a live demonstration of Google Search Console, a suite of online tools that help identify and fix problems with website content.
If you want your precious information to be seen on the World Wide Web, you can’t just create things that people want to see and hear and read. You also need to develop some of the skills of a publisher and librarian in the digital age. Google Search Console allows you to see your website the same way a search engine sees it. Instead of elegant prose and beautiful images, these tools see clusters of links and structural elements, and detect missing pieces of websites. They also show who links to your site, evaluate how “friendly” your site is to phone or tablet visitors, may uncover some security issues, and assist search engines in helping properly classify and catalog your content. This presentation is intended for managers, web content creators, and others who want not just to be published, but to be read.
About the Speakers: Lawrence is the Internet Projects Manager for NOAA’s National Ocean Service and Co-Chair of the NOAA Web Committee. Over the past 20-odd years, he has been involved in creating, maintaining or administering over 500 websites, for NOAA as well as non-profits. He is very fond of penguins, science fiction, and numbers that paint pretty pictures.
Jennifer Coletta has been a Web Developer and Technical Manager for the National Ocean Service since 2005. She maintains and manages web services and online communications through the NOS Web Admin Team and NOAA Web Committee.
Lawrence I. Charters, “Performance Measures and Web Analytics for Educators,” December 11, 2017 (PDF, 2.2 MB)
Presentation on web analytics tailored to science educators. Science educators not only have to deal with the burden of teaching science and related disciplines (logic, mathematics), but also deal with teaching people how to tell the difference between science, pseudo-science, outright fiction pretending to be science, and fantasy presented as science. Web analytics are offered as a tool to better present science to the public.