Web Page Design: A Different Multimedia - Softcover

This book is a comprehensive guide to building outstanding web pages. The author addresses the key problems of information overload and users getting "Lost in Cyberspace." She also pioneered new design techniques. With help from this book, you can go beyond building an ordinary Web page, and build a great one instead.

Who Should Use This Book
Once you have learned HTML, you have only just begun. In the early days, it was enough to simply have a web page. This is no longer the case. When your competition numbers in the tens of millions of other web pages, you need to stand out. This is where good design comes in.

This book is for anyone who designs web pages, manages their design process, or reviews and approves web pages (such as the Marketing staff). This book goes a long way toward explaining what makes an effective web page and site-not just cool ones.

How This Book Is Organized

Chapter 1, "Web: A Different Multimedia," describes the similarities and differences between the Web and all other media.

Chapter 2, "Content Design," provides a high-level overview of creating content for the Web.

Chapter 3, "Cognitive Design," discusses the ways to get and keep users' attention without overwhelming them with Information Overload.

Chapter 4, "Audience Considerations," presents the varying needs of the audience and discusses how to analyze the audience and tailor the web design.

Chapter 5, "Navigational Design," provides background into hypertext structures and offers structure design philosophies to carry design to large scale and next generation sites.

Chapter 6, "Layout," presents guidelines for integrating standard desktop publishing with the Web, both at the basic level and with enhancements.

Chapter 7, "Designing Graphical Elements," offers insight into the biggest problems in cross-platform design-the graphics.

Chapter 8, "Meta-Information," provides an overview for the structure needed in next generation web creations to meet the needs of web agents as well as human surfers.

Chapter 9, "Interactivity Design," describes the design of forms and other interactive elements that start to create the coming mass customization.

Chapter 10, "Designing for Time," discusses the temporal aspects of page and site evolution.

Chapter 11, "Experiential Design," discusses design for web media other than HTML.

Chapter 12, "Testing Your Design," itemizes the areas that need to be tested before and after exposing your site to the public.

Case Study 1, "Sun and Java," tours the Sun web site.

Case Study 2, "Point Communications," tours the Point Communication web site.

Case Study 3, "Golfweb," tours the Golfweb web site.

Design Philosophies

In writing this book, we tried to take on the perspective of all schools of thought that contribute to the Web. The Web is not just a technical programmer's playpen or the sandbox of the desktop publisher.

The Web brings together a wide range of disciplines, including cognitive design, desktop publishing layout (and eventually typography), graphics design, 3-D virtual world design, and interactivity challenges akin to computer game playing, hypertext theory, library sciences, and classical document management.

This book may seem a little scattered at times, but there is no way to reconcile all of these various disciplines into a coherent flowing whole-yet. Bear with us. This too is evolving-.

Mary's Philosophy

I have watched the various groups take to the Web as it moved from its research home to the commercial world. Those that designed it originally had a noble philosophy that has been handed down through generations of Internet design-make the stuff work everywhere. These people value the standards process and the creation of a tool that can and has reached critical mass.

However, the Web has gone far beyond the people that originally designed it. Thousands of people and hundreds of companies are contributing to this Stone Soup. Along the way they have made changes and enhancements. Those enhancements are not without value. They add a coherence that cannot be implemented with the existing standard. And they add this coherence in a far more timely fashion than a formal standards committee can respond to.

Therein lies the dilemma. Not only has the Web created a new multimedia out of various tinker toys, it has also devised a new way of measuring time-the web year.

Web years are similar to dog years in the fact that they are shorter than standard human processes. The initial 5 years of web evolution has followed the same path that it took television 75 years to traverse. The Web shows no sign of slowing this rampant evolutionary process.

Each year that you as a designer participate in the Web, you must revise your design strategy from the ground up.

- In 1994, it was enough to have a web page and start sharing information.

- In 1995, that web page met with stiff competition as the number of web sites climbed. At its peak, web sites doubled every 45 days. This rate of change has slowed but is still advancing at supersonic speeds. The design requirements here were to create some enticing aspect that would motivate users to return. Some sites added flashy graphics, others, cute hacks. Many relied on the tried and true: content.

- In 1996, interactivity is the rage. The Web is not a mass communications medium and the "any-color car-er, web page- as long as it is black" is no longer acceptable. People talk back now.

- In 1997, the evolution of interactivity will give way to full- fledged mass customization. If you thought your niches were small before, you are in for a surprise. The personalized newspaper, The Daily Me, will be the rule instead of the exception. Web sites will have to follow suit to stay in the game. Jakob Niesen has already forecast the end of surfing the Web. People are no longer reaching out to get information. It must come to them, prepackaged just as they like it.

- In 1998, there stands a good chance of having more web pages than there are people on the planet. This infoglut will be met head on with technology, namely agents.

Agents will have been around for many years by this time. They will have crawled through the Web as spiders and robots in 1996, indexing web pages and searching for inexpensive CD-ROMS. Their first fledgling steps in 1997 will begin with simple Daily Me compilations and extended shopping trips for concert tickets. By 1998, the user will no longer depend on an information provider to compile and provide editorial content. Agents will have usurped even this role.

There is a shocking level of change in this forecast. That level of change is no greater than the previous evolution of the Web. It has sweeping ramifications for the future of design. The Age of the Knowledge Worker has really arrived.

Randy's Design Philosophy

Communicating on the Internet via the World Wide Web has no other precedent. In the time it took the Gutenberg press to mass-produce and distribute books, years had elapsed. The World Wide Web is a mere infant in comparison, appearing on the scene less than two years ago. Yet it has grown to become one of the most superior technologies of communication and interaction we have ever seen. It is robust, personal, easy to use, international, and potentially larger in its offerings than radio, television, video, telephone, or cable. To design for it is to design the future.

I became interested in the World Wide Web because I am an educational technologist. Since my early days in college in the late 70s, I have been looking for a way to educate large numbers of people at the same time, on any subject. In doing so, I would be able to affect the way a market evolves, improve processes within an organization, open the potential and creativity of any student, and ultimately raise the consciousness of the individual. So, my academic history led me through one technology after another:

laser disc technology, computer-assisted learning, artificial intelligence research, computer-based training, application software design, multimedia development, electronic performance support systems, CD-ROM, and now, the globally distributed, interactive World Wide Web.

Using these various educational technologies, I designed and developed different ways for students to learn and collaborate. But no matter what I tried, I kept hitting the same brick wall. I could only develop an environment as rich as the information that I found in libraries, books, and from other colleagues. I was intellectually bound by the content. If I used content experts, once the product was complete, the content expert returned to his own world of continuous learning, and I to my next project. What happened to the program? It became dated, then unused.

Like CD-ROM technology, I could produce different pieces of multimedia and show a little bit about a subject or delve into a subject in detail. But I had to continually authenticate the information, expanding my own weary knowledge on the subject and maintaining the quality and quantity of the information myself. And, without the classroom contact, I couldn't really get the students to