Notes On Web Site Design

EA Research

Notes On Web Site Design

10/09/00

As a web architect develop your principles that guide you. If they are good principles you will find using them every time helps you continually produce great sites.

The Internet is its own media - The Internet has a special nature like any other mass media - To understand media look at the effect of the audience experience. For example, radio for most audiences is about doing something else while you listen to voices and music. Sound is often a background medium that solicits response. The Internet however is a direct, interactive, international, time-based information network and unlike any other medium is magically shaped in a personal manner. It also has infinite depth and because it is digital can deliver multiple scaleable media. The limits of the medium are also key - In the 20th century the Internet is more about time than space. People will only wait so long for a long page to load. In the zeal to delight, many young Internet designers forget that in distribution many people find it tortuous to wait for heavy graphics, big video files, complex pages. If you forget the purpose you will forget the effect. Traffic and audience are often overlooked, so build the right vessel to deliver the volumes expected. Sites jammed with viewing requests make them temporarily unavailable, and invisible. The popular web has evolved to present information, convey transactions, project personalities, represent companies, but the total inventory of effects is not yet complete. A simple definition of the Internet is "Everyone's computer connected", and this networked nature of interparticipating computers is at the heart of its nature.
Design for screen and print - Most web design companies design for the screen experience, often overlooking that many customers try to print their pages. Your web page is the new currency. In other words, web pages should function as useful print collateral. Print designs often fail when depending on new fangled screen technology - frames, background image, table layouts, or illegible text color schemes.
Deliver information first - Fundamentally, the Internet media is designed to deliver information - not entertainment. The dream of many executives new to the web is they want to see rolling logos, my master's voice, the corporate sound and video of the month. But the audience sees this as vanity because the reality is that few people have the endurance to wait for the pages to load and even less endurance if all they see is another corporate slide show. You must always ask yourself - what information is being conveyed and are these the right digital medium to do it in? The Internet is a lightning bolt for information. Entertainment values should lag behind your primary information purpose.
Design customer relationships. Any web site is more than a web presence. It has the capacity for expressing a direct interactive relationship with the audience. Just like a building, a site should offer distinct places for audience information, audience support, connection with the site identity, audience entertainment. Perhaps most overlooked is the fact that your site empowers awareness of the audience as a group. Your audience likes to see other people participating in the site, so expose audience presence in the architecture.
Connect the audience interactively, beginning with email. Computer interaction is unique to this medium, and behind the screen tons of pages await. The important effect is to let the audience influence the outcome. The most often-overlooked element is the simple use of email. It is an effective vocal tool for the audience. Remember the Internet is not just for surfing, it is a collection of services that you can add to your site, but don't overlook the founding rudimentary service - email. Web site designers often overlook this simple and critical interactive service that gives the audience a voice. Email is the backbone of doing business and sharing personal messages transported over the Internet. Begin by developing an email system to host the audience - appoint someone to develop the audience just like a disk jockey on a radio station. I sometimes tell clients, "On the Internet, the audience is the product" Unlike any other medium, the digital audience interacts directly with many points - services, making choices, and sending email around when they find a place they like and when they encounter things they don't. People will write in and they need to be responded to. What's new is the speed with which a company's culture now needs to respond - but Internet culture is another story.
Information when it is with you is different. This observation applies to small handheld Internet devices. Having mobile GPS (global positioning system), time of day and preference information radically effects the utility of personal data. Information on "armchair" computers can be complex and is fixed in place. On the go, people can benefit from retuned databases that are sensitive to where they are, the time of day and their continued personal reference to being in places and times.

- Mark Beaulieu 2000
maker of Digital Cities and the United States Restaurant Guide www.usrg.com