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Behind the
Spotlight
 |
| S.O.S. Mathematics:
Read how these three Math Professors put their help site
online! |
 By Betsey
Lenz, Editor |
Three University
Professors are the web publishers behind, S.O.S. Mathematics.
Check out what Amine Khamsi, a Math Professor at the University of
Texas-El Paso, says about their site (1/2000):
BL,
editor: How did you get online?
Amine: The three
of us, Nancy Marcus, Helmut Knaust, and myself, are math
professors at the University of Texas-El Paso. In the Spring of
'96, we started thinking about creating a mathematics help site
for our students. After securing funding from the National Science
Foundation, NASA, and the U of T, S.O.S. Mathematics
went online in August '96. At this point, our site was strictly a
University Site.
BL, editor: How did you get started
with your current site?
we quickly found out the
appeal of a free mathematics help site extended far beyond
El Paso
|
Amine: Well, we quickly found out the
appeal of a free mathematics help site extended far beyond
El Paso. We decided to become independent, and our
university supported us, so we started a commercial
reiteration of our site. In April 1999, S.O.S. Mathematics
moved to its current location online: http://www.sosmath.com/.
|
BL, editor: How
much time do you spend on your site?
Amine: How
much time we spend on our site really varies. During “maintenance
time,” we spend maybe a combined average of 15 hours per week.
When we develop new content, usually in the summer, this becomes a
full-time job for all three of us!
BL, editor: Who are
your customers?
Amine: Most of our users are
high school and college students, parents wanting to help their
schoolchildren, teachers, and professionals. Also, we have a lot
of adult users who want to prepare for a return to college. Last
fall we created a "Cyberboard," which allows for direct
interaction with our users, and we also ran a user
survey.
BL, editor: What advice would you give a newbie
going online today?
Amine: We have two, no let's
make that three, pieces of advice for anyone starting an online
company:
First, be Patient! Even if you have a wonderful
idea and create a beautiful site, it will take some time
before users will find you. During the summer of 1996, we
enthusiastically spent hours and hours developing our
content, but our user response during the next six months
was meager. It took about 12 to 18 months before we felt
that we had enough visitors to support our
efforts. |
be Patient
|
keep it simple
|
Second, keep it simple! Before we developed
the site, we spent quite a bit of time discussing the
desired feel of our site. And, I think we got it right.
Even though our web site has about 2,500 HTML pages, our
users can easily find the content they are looking for.
Putting mathematical formulae on the web is a technical
challenge, but we've kept the download time for each of
our pages rather short.
|
Third, it is fun to work in a group! A lot of
our satisfaction in the development of our site has come
from the three of us being a wonderful team!  |
work in a group
|
|
© 1999 BURST! Media, LLC. All Rights
Reserved. | |
February 2, 2000