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The rush to the Web continues, seemingly unabated. Businesses large and
small appear to see a Web presence as an essential as we approach the
millennium.
As a result, "Web design" companies are springing up like mushrooms,
catering, in many cases, top a perceived need for low-cost site design.
Now, as we all know, site design is an odd mix of technical knowledge,
aesthetic sensibility and design skill.
None of which appear to be present at the site of Doc Dempsy Web Designs.
The site is a dreadful mishmash of clashing colors, mismatched fonts,
textured backgrounds, scrolling applets and unnecessary animation. Which,
of course, is the good Doctor's absolute prerogative.
However, much to our surprise, we found a client list at the site. Which,
to us, indicates a woeful lack of forward planning on the part of the clients.
It's a trifle difficult to discern the Doc's charges, but sites appear to
be in the $100 - $300 range.
Which strikes us as about $99 to $299 too much.
Remember - you get what you pay for...
We have often discussed the notion of "Web bloat" in this column. It's a
primary cause of slow network performance and excessive page download times.
The advent of WYSIWYG HTML editors a few years ago allowed pretty much
anyone to create a site with absolutely no knowledge of HTML.
Unfortunately, proprietary WYSIWYG editors - like
Adobe PageMill and MS Front Page - tend to
insert large amounts of extraneous code into the pages they produce.
So what? you may ask.
Well, multiply a few thousand million page loads a day by 1K of unnecessary
mark-up, and a lot of bandwidth is being consumed to no discernible end.
So what's the solution? Well, in the "old days", we eschewed the use of
editors entirely and coded in Notepad or its Mac equivalent,
SimpleText.
This was tedious, but kept code to an irreducible minimum.
You, dear readers, can take advantage of Super NoteTab, a "bare bones" HTML
editor for a stunning $5. (If you are on a budget, there's a freeware
version, Super NoteTab Light.)
Unzipped, the app weighs in at around 2Mb. It's easy to use and includes a
dictionary and a thesaurus.
If you're building pages yourself, you'll quickly come to appreciate the
virtues of this app - you control the code that goes into your page 100%.
And if you're hiring a designer for your site, ask 'em which editor they
use. If they use Super NoteTab (or any of the NoteTab family), there's a
good chance that they know what they're doing...
In a recent issue of the ClickZ
newsletter, Sean Carton, Managing Parter of Carton Donofrio
Interactive, lamented that he had "become really bored with the
'net lately".
He expanded this notion by noting that, as the New Medium is increasingly
adopted as a means of communication by large corporations, so content has
become increasingly bland. It's becoming like network television - the
desire not to offend becomes paramount, and the result is a vanilla Web.
We're inclined to agree with Sean. So what is it that inclines us to view
the few sites we visit on a regular basis?
Easy. The existence of a defined "Point of View". Sean cites the
inestimable Jakob
Nielsen, a judgment which we can endorse with enthusiasm. We would
also cite RageBoy, and his
nemesis David
Weinberger.
The point here is that, while we may not always agree with Jakob, Chris or
Dave, we know that, when we visit their sites, we are guaranteed to find
something thought-provoking (or, in the case of RageBoy, something
downright offensive).
Writing for the Web is a vastly different undertaking from writing for
print. We suspect the blandness of much Web content is due to a
misunderstanding of this basic truth.
So, if you are providing regularly-updated content at your site (of course
you are! Aren't you...?), give it a provocative PoV. The result will be a
loyal cadre of repeat visitors. we guarantee it...
Yell is, apparently, the UK
Yellow Pages Online. The organization seems to claim some expertise in the
New Medium, as it has instituted the "Yell Awards".
These claim to offer recognition to UK websites in a variety of categories.
We tooled off to the award winner for "Most Innovative Website". And found
ourselves on the server of the venerable Co-operative Bank, an
august institution which has been providing low-cost banking in the UK
since time immemorial.
But "innovative"? We don't think so. The homepage takes an age to load (but
perhaps that was just our dial-up connection), and features nothing more
than an imagemap and what appear to be animated jpg's.
The "Yellow Pages" in the UK are part of British Telecom, which used to be
part of the General Post Office until the wholesale privatization
occasioned by years of Tory misrule.
Come on England! Getting knocked out of the World Cup by the detestable
Argentinians was bad enough. Don't embarrass yourselves further by
subscribing to the "Yell' view of the online universe!
The Irish firm Nua Ltd is an
excellent example of how the New Medium imposes new ways of doing business.
This Dublin-based Internet Consultancy and Development firm regularly
produces two newsletter. Nua Internet
Surveys, published bi-monthly, gathers statistics on worldwide Web
usage from a variety of sources, analyzes them and melds them into a
coherent whole.
As such, it is an invaluable resource for anyone with a commercial interest
in the New Medium.
It saves its subscribers time, inasmuch as they themselves do not have to
search for the stats themselves.
The analysis is trenchant. And it's free...
Nua CEO Gerry McGovern also produces a regular newsletter, Nua Thinking, which
is, by turns, aggravating and a beacon of sanity in an otherwise insane
world.
In any event, Gerry always provides food for thought.
Nua, then, is in the business of providing information, analysis and
opinion to its many subscribers. For free.
Which is the nub of the matter. In order to be successful commercially in
the New Medium, the only workable business model is one in which you give
things away.
Paradoxical? Sure. But it works. As evidence, we would cite the acquisition
of a minority sharholding in the company - and a majority shareholding in
Nua's Online Community, Local
Ireland - by Telecom Eireann
.
It's a fair bet that Nua will be around for a long time.
--John
Blower
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