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Ratings Given for Top Picks

While there are plenty of Star Trek webpage indexes around, only TWO make notable attempts at including vast amount of Star Trek pages available: Adam Staines's WWW STAR TREK and Lucas Sambucci's Star Trek: WWW. Both sites give ranks to the various pages, and in the most part the ratings are fair, but there is only one rating for the entire site, and ratings are updated rather slowly and sometimes rating anomalies occur.

To avoid unfairness, I I've rated each of the sites I rated listed in three categories, for a rating from 0 to 5, in 0.5 increments, with 5 being highest. The categories are: Content, Presentation, and Experience. The rating of 2.5 is considered average. From the three scores an overall score is calculated. My rating system is similar to Point Communication's Top Five Percent web sites rating system, except I decided on 0.5 increments and 0 to 5 instead of 0 to 50. An overall score is then computed. For those of you who reads Computer Gaming World, that's similar too.

The browsers used for judging is Netscape 2.02 (supports frames and all Netscape extensions) and America On-Line's V2.5 web browser (does NOT support tables or any Netscape extensions at the moment, probably the most PLAIN graphical browser one can find).

For the guilty party's sake, bad examples are not listed. [grin] But if your homepage did not make one of the specific categories but rather, in Other Star Trek Pages, you may have commited one of the ten items listed here...

Here are the criteria for the ratings:

Content

To get a high rating in content, the web site needs lots of downloads and/or lots of information on the specific topic of the web site. For example: if the website is about Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi), I expect to see filmography, episode list, lots of pictures and sound bites, interviews, recent news, etc. And there should be an index to find things easily, plus a page of recent additions to notify repeat customers of new stuff. The uniqueness of content will also affect the score.

For example of good content, see Vidiot's Home Page, which contains LOTS of advanced previews of all current Star Trek series, available nowhere else!

Presentation

To get high points in presentation, the page should look attractive. Mainly I am looking for logical and easy to read layout. Netscape extensions, sounds, animations, and other thrills are nice but not required for high score. On the other hand, BAD HTML and abused Netscape extensions such as badly formatted frames and BLINK will actually result in DEDUCTIONS in one's score.

If the same page do NOT look garbled in NON-Netscape browser it will get a bonus for being cross-browser. Finally, pages that used someone else's art (not in download, but as in-line pictures) will get a lower score due to lack of originality, and those who did so without acknowledging the original owner will get DOUBLE the penalty!

For example of great presentation, see Andrew Tong's Star Trek: The Next Generation Page. You get animations, sounds, random episode quotes with hypertext links, all looking great (at least in Netscape).

Experience

Is the site worth visiting? Did you say wow or duh when you left? Would you bookmark it and come back to it later? Is the site snappy in downloading or can you take a coffee break before you can see the content?

For example, a site with great content or presentation but takes too long to download (>60 seconds) will get a deduction in experience. Effective use of WIDTH, HEIGHT, and LOWSRC can avert this penalty. Remember, your page may come up in 5 seconds when you develope it on your hard drive or with a T1 connection, but the rest of the world are still using 14.4K or 28.8K modems.

Sites that can be browsed in text mode only (Netscape with Auto Load Image option turned off) without missing any links or have pictures with no labels gets bonus points.

For example of great experience, see Andrew Tong's Star Trek: The Next Generation Page. You get animations, sounds, random episode quotes with hypertext links, all looking great (at least in Netscape).

Site owners: if you don't agree with my rating, you are welcome to e-mail me and present your case. If you change/upgrade your page, please also contact me for re-evaluation.

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