Many like to think of themselves as the only site you'll ever need. Of course, this isn't how people surf. While it's true that archives and databases serve as major attractions for many sites, oftentimes people are there to simply pick up the current issue of your publication, look for jobs or products, or to register again because they changed jobs and email addresses.

I wonder how much time, energy, and money goes into extraordinary content and programming that is never fully appreciated because people didn't know to look for it, or didn't recognize it when they saw it, or had to wait too long for the hot graphics to load. To sites who bury their content, I have one thing to say: "Don't put the milk in the back of the store." This is what grocery stores do in order to get you to pass by cookies and other temptations. It doesn't work so well on the web. People like to pluck the delectables from your site and move on, sad to say.

This can be good news for you. Instead of knocking yourself out trying to offer a complete menu of everything, think about serving up a very limited excellent menu that you become known for. Look at The Soup Nazi, made famous by Seinfeld. You wouldn't think of asking him to diversify by offering brioche in the morning, would you? Well, the same is true for many web sites. Are you sure you want to offer chat? What if you had a chat service and no one came? It happens! And it's embarrassing to you when people look in there and see two people had a short dialog three days apart, two months ago.

Have you ever gotten to a site, looking for one thing, and then get distracted and off onto a tangent that leads you down some path of links at the end of which you are wondering, "Why am I here? How did I get here in the first place? And what was it I was looking for? I'm off-mission." Why is it that once you get to a site, they offer you a dizzying array of links to everywhere, except to that which you want to get to? It's as if the web site is saying to you, "Here's your hat; what's your hurry?" Simple micro sites give both the purveyor and the user a highly defined mission and focus. Just because you've found 64 other links that are on-topic to the subject at hand doesn't mean you should post those links. These kind of sites remind me of infomercials where they say, "But wait! There's more!" More often than not, I don't want more. I want less. I find it astonishing that people don't trust their own instincts when putting together web sites. Do you like to be distracted or disoriented? Of course not. So why would visitors to your site be any different? Diffuse that disorientation by taking the following steps:

• Offer a "Search This Site" tool that is available on every page above the scroll bar in any resolution.
  
• Shrink your site -- It'll be cheaper for you and less confusing to them.
  
• Float the good stuff to the top; don't play games by forcing surfers through more screens. It comes across as being overly manipulative.
  
• Keep each page to 20 to 30K max in file size. Surfers are more apt to stay with you if they know each click does not equal 30 seconds of downtime.
  

Micro sites for micro markets. Sometimes it's appropriate for these sites to have a limited life span, sometimes they're an ongoing thing. You can save beaucoup bucks by not overdoing your site. In fact, you might consider taking some or all or more of that money to promote the site more thoroughly, over a longer period of time, to that micro audience you've so strategically identified.

Having said all this, I don't want you to think that the micro target is for everybody. Large corporate web sites who must speak to many stakeholders, prospects, potential employees, etc., have good reason to build and maintain expansive web sites. But even big companies promote micro sites. If big companies think small, then certainly small companies should consider the same.