JOHN SUMSER,
S P O N S O R S Find out more
Hall Of Fame8 Corners of ECommerceTypes
of Links
Red Herring
The advertising industry is on the verge of being shattered into a thousand fragments due to the knowledge explosion and the proliferation of new technologies. There are no more grand theories that hold sway over the entire industry. Michael Strangelove
Advertising is
Reality
The System
It's better to
All material on this
|
... |
Click OK to receive our occasional Newsletter
John Blower is actually quite busy watching the World Cup. After nearly a year of intense road delivery of IBN seminars amd daily reporting, he's kicking his feet up in new digs. We'll run some of his best stuff from the archives in his absence.
Or, as the sign on the physicist's door said
In a newsgroup to which we subscribe, comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design,
we came across these principles of good site design, thoughtfully compiled
by Tobias C. Brown, with assistance from
Alan J. Flavell, Sue Jordon, and Susan Lesch.
"1. Write for multiple Web browsers to provide easy access to the widest
possible audience.
The World Wide Web is a multi-platform, non-browser specific medium. It should
not matter whether people browse your web pages using Netscape Navigator 4.02,
AOL Browser 3.0, Lynx 2.7, or NetPhonic's Web-On-Call.
Each browser ought to render your informational web pages without problems.
If a Web page is designed properly, blind individuals using text-to-voice
or Braille web browsers can easily access and review your work.
2. Condense textual content to fit the time and attention constraints of
today's busy Web users. Take a look at Thoughts
on Web Style,
3. Use small (byte-wise) graphics so graphics load more quickly in graphics-capable
browsers.
It is not advisable to use GIFs for everything. It's of the first importance
to make the right choice between JPEG and a palette-based format. Avoid blindly
choosing GIF and then trying to rescue yourself from the resulting problems.
JPEG image compression Frequently
Asked Questions
4. When using graphics, provide textual alternatives for image disabled
or text-only web browsers and indexing agents.
5. Run Web pages through a validator to test their compliance with HTML
standards.
Modify pages until they validate, because compliant pages have a better chance
of being rendered by various Web browsers, as the writer intends.
However, if you intend something that is impractical with HTML, it will be
no less impractical for being syntactically valid.
Work with the strengths of HTML rather than trying to batter it into a WYSIWYG
page design system.
What You See Is
Not What Others Get on the Web
6. Run pages through Lynx
View or
Lynx-me or, best of all, view them using a browser like Lynx, to see
how the "text-only" world sees your documents. Make documents Lynx-friendly.
7. Spell check your documents.
8. Establish a routine to help you locate and fix broken internal and external
Web site links.
8. If your web site URL or eMail address will change occasionally, consider
using a service that provides eMail forwarding and URL redirection.
9. Submit your Web site address to an appropriate newsgroup
for a critical peer review.
10. Promote your Web site by adding your URL to search engines and directories.
To ensure that people can easily find your Web site, it may be necessary to
modify your pages to take best advantage of current search
technologies."
Thank you Tobias et al.
We all had copies of the book "Games People Play" by Eric Berne MD in the '60's and '70's. It analyzed human interaction in terms of three ego states - Adult, Parent and Child.
It seems to us, a lot of the time, that many site owners are stuck in the Child ego state when it comes to Web business - "Gimme, gimme, gimme!".
We have long believed that doing business on the Web is about incremental transactions. Gerry McGovern (of Nua Ltd), for example, writes a regular newsletter. We find his views by turns infuriating, aggravating, thought-provoking and eminently sensible.
The point being that Gerry, no matter what he says, offers us value in the form of food for thought.
At some point in the future, we would expect him to ask his large and loyal readership for something - a referral, for example. This we would expect - it's the nature of the transaction.
The Web is an excellent medium for facilitating this type of long-term, incremental, transactional relationship.
It's astonishing to us how many site operators simply don't understand this.
The notion of "bloatware" is not new, our chum the Gorilla from Redmond being the primary offender in this respect.
But it seems to us that the phenomenon is increasingly infecting the Web, in the form of large, unwieldy sites which take an age to load. Like this page from Artura Design & Development , which sports several nice, fat juicy images each of which weighs in at a hefty 100k+. As suppliers of "innovative web design", they really should know better...
"Web bloat" is attributable to four factors:
(You can find an admirable e xposition on this topic at Phundria, "Scotland's first online lampoon magazine".)
So what? you may ask. We've all got fast modems, local unlimited calls and unlimited Web access, haven't we?
Well...no.
Apart from the general requirement for a site operator to be user-centric in both the provision of information and the design and architecture of their site(s), in the UK, for example, all calls are metered.
Indeed, some UK service providers are now placing restrictions on outbound bandwidth consumed by their non commercial customers. If you exceed the limit on some sites, you're told either to shut down or go commercial. On other providers, you get shut down for a day.
While we expect the UK telecom model to emulate the US one, in the
shorter-term, most non-US telecoms meter all calls. And as the Web reaches
saturation in the US (the rate of increase has already started to slow), so
more and more people from "the Rest of the World" will be looking at your
handiwork...
Peapod is one of a growing army of "home-oriented" service organizations (which seem to be particularly prevalent in the Boston area).
Essentially, the company contracts with local supermarkets, receives your order online, and delivers the goods to your door. This is the kind of service for which the Web is tailor made - you can place your order at any time of the day or night, specify brands and so forth.
Convenience is the name of the game, which makes this type of operation a boon for working parents, those with irregular schedules, or simply those (like us) who can't bear the thought of actually going to the supermarket.
Of course, one pays a premium for this kind of service, so we would ask ourselves whether or not Peapod will survive once the current rosy economic picture loses its lustre...
Interestingly enough, we found the Peapod site through a promotional floppy.
On the face of it, one would have thought that accountants would have recognized the utilitarian function of the Web and have been in the forefront of using it.
After all, for most of us here in the US, the need to communicate with an accountant is but once a year. And, in general, such information as needs to be conveyed doesn't need a face-to-face.
We picked - at random - a firm based in California. Their site was an execise in futility - it looks as if they have a site "because they should".
Instead of offering up-to-the-minute tax hints, a ready-reckoner and the invitation to receive files via FTP on a secure server, we have nothing more than a rather amateurish online brochure.
The company would have spent its money better by concentrating on traditional advertising and promotion, offering FTP to its existing client base and slowly establishing a web presence through regular, timely updates of information.
Utility is the key to successful exploitation of the New Medium.
Take a look at the Archives. We've indexed all the past issues with topic pointers.
All material on this site is © 1995, 1996 by IBN (The Internet Business Network), Mill Valley, CA 94941 |