We found this posted in an internet marketing discussion group, and it led us into the email exchange that follows it (re-printed here with the writer's permission). Mary E. S. Morris is the author of HTML for Fun and Profit, co-author of Solaris Implementation: A Guide for Systems Administrators, and she has a new book coming soon: Web Page Design: A Different Multimedia. She has worked as a webmaster, including at Sun Microsystems. ------------------------------------------------------- Date: 19 Mar 1996 16:04:14 -0800 From: marym@Finesse.COM (Mary Morris) Subject: The Gap Nick Gassman said: > The gap between top-grade sites and home-brew efforts will widen. Yep. I really do believe it will. Top-funded sites will increasingly throw high-res graphics, over-fragmented frames, "wonderful" backgrounds and a welter of new media types that 50% or less of their audience can use at an audience looking for content, ease of use, and speed. Why? Because that's what their big budget "promotion" people (no offense to the knowledgeable people on this list) who believe they must invest the $1-4 million figures quoted in Business Week. Home-brew on the other hand, will continue to put feedback links on every page, and listen to the people that comment. Home-brew won't focus on fancy whiz-bang techniques. Instead they will do something similar to good Japanese art. The ultimate minimalist creation. They will go out and find the useful hacks like the expanding/collapsing menus found at www.cuesys.com. They will design really useful sites that even those poor souls on the 640x480 @ 256 systems can actually read. These people won't go out and spend thousands of dollars on posting everywhere and linking everywhere (like the latest round of spam including the Supermodels in the Rain Forest calendar). Instead they will lurk on relevant groups and participate giving their personal attention instead of throwing money at a situation. These home brew folks will experience things like Teresita's twenty-someodd fold return on investment. The big spenders, on the other hand, will find themselves in Business Week's 20% that are considering leaving the Internet. Yep, the gap will widen significantly, primarily because most big business throw money at a situation instead of personally nurturing it. As for those that believe that it will take lots of money for the new specialized skills like databases, Java and such. I won't deny that there are some good applications, however, I haven't consistently seen the new technology utilized for the customer's benefit. Mostly, new technology is used for technology's sake. If you have some good new-tech sites (besides C|Net's Java PC chooser) - tell me. That is the only really good one that I have seen. Saqqara's database ranks as somewhere between ok and good (mostly for user interface reasons). I'd love to hear about good new-tech. I'm not convinced that people believe Java can be used for more than just animations. Mary Morris ----------------------------------------------------------------- Jim Heath, Viacorp Pty Ltd: All that is admirable. Do you have a website? We'd love to know what else you're thinking about all this. Mary Morris: Actually, I don't have a formal website primarily because I already have too much work and don't want to encourage people to offer me more work. I do have a book coming out sometime in May called Web Page Design: A Different Multimedia. Heath: We are old-hand copywriters, struggling to make this thing work. Here's a head-scratcher for us: how to keep people from getting lost in big sites, and missing things they'd find valuable. Even if you put in a site-search feature, how would they know to search for what they'd never suspect is there? We're thinking of using a detailed table of contents as a link, or even an alpha index (with links). Morris: Everything depends on the size of your site, the expectations of your audience, the skill level(s) of your audience, and what message you want to convey. As for what you are describing, it is an index in the fashion of the index in the back of a book. Sun Microsystems does this. Visit their site and then their product page. The link to this view should be there. Sun basically ran up against a brick wall because they couldn't index a site of 10,000+ documents effectively. Heath: That's something like the way we were heading. One site we're working on is for a mining company. In addition to lots of stuff for schools, and company background, and technical material by the square kilometre, there are odd tidbits like: grandma's uses for salt (handy for puffy eyes, apparently), and aboriginal rock art. Now who would think that a mining company would have a good section on rock art, with lots of photos? So if we stuck that in a detailed table of contents, something they could scan down fairly fast and see all the topic categories -- well, we think it could work. The Sun index isn't detailed enough to do that. Anyway, we're going to try it and see. If some people find it useful, well, OK. Morris: I think it is something that might take some time to become popular, but I like the idea. There is a new or "emerging" field called either "Human Factors" or "Interface Design" or some variant on this. These people are the ones that have been responsible for many of the good (and bad) things that have happened to your desktop whether you are on a Mac or a Windows box. These people have been utilized heavily for program interface development. They are in their element when designing these things. In the long term, an Interface design person should always be used during the design phase of a reasonably funded site. They are more important than many other functions. As far as I am concerned they should be given veto power on a design and considered to be the voice of the customer (of course they should be able to prove their qualifications as well). Heath: A book or brochure can be flipped through. The web needs an analogue. When I find a large site, I often print out the whole thing, put a fold-back clip on the mass of paper, turn off the machine, sit down --- and flip through it. Morris: The web is a different medium than print. A good web site will have 5 or less key points per page, only real content pages should scroll (an not too much either), the key points will be obvious via scanning (reading should not be a requirement) and absorbing enough of the page to decide if it meets your needs should take no more than 30 seconds (and an equal 30 seconds to load). The site should follow the though process of people, what are their most frequently asked questions? The pages should answer those questions - not present information as a standard flyer does (note: there may be some good fliers out their, but most of them are almost worthless to me because they give data, not answer my questions.) Heath: Oooooo, right. But it can be damn difficult to guess what those questions might be. But if you listen, as you pointed out in your Gassman email, then you can fix the site up, build it almost of people's questions and wishes. That's what Jim Rhodes did -- he tells me -- at his Vicarage Hotel website. It shows. Morris: This is where the Human Factors person comes in. They should be experts at getting a set of people (often watching them from behind a mirror) and observing their actions and probing their thought patterns. The Human factors person is sort of like Market research for the attention factor. Don't expect to operate in a vacuum Anyway, those are my thoughts. Mary