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Is there a Doctor in the House?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, to 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... August 6, 1998 Fat and SassyWe 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... August 5, 1998 PoVAugust 04, 1998 Don't Just Shout - Yell!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! August 03, 1998 Nua LtdThe 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.
795 Mammoth Road "Less is always more."
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