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Talking of Ireland...July 29, 1998 Web "Design"?The Encyclopedia Britannica Internet Guide is another of those "Best of the Web" guides, which ranks sites on a 1 ("noteworthy) to 5 ("best of the web") star grading scale.As such, it is as useful as any other list o' links. (We must admit to a bias against any Encyclopedia Britannica after the 1898 edition...however...) The third item in eBlast's current list of goodies is an excellent article on the state of web design by David E Brown. David is a former associate editor of Metropolis design magazine. David bemoans the lack of inspirational creativity evident in both online and mainstream media design. We are inclined to agree with him. ABC Television's recent billboard campaign, featuring black text on a yellow background (Semiotics 101) is a fine example of a boring lack of originality. Good design in any medium is the seamless melding of form and function. In the case of web design, it involves intuitive site architecture married to illuminating graphics and solid information design - qualities which are all too rare on today's Web. David does, however, point us in the direction of RockShox, a company which makes suspension units for bicycles. We like this site. It incorporates animation on the homepage unobtrusively and effectively. Graphics are original and small, and one is never in doubt as to what one will find at the end of each link. We found the site as a whole fast to load, even at a miserly 24,000 bps. Take a look at this site, even if, like us, you haven't been on a bicycle for years. And take 10 minutes to read David's article - it's food for thought. July 28, 1998 Recommend ItEveryone knows that the best form of advertising is word-of-mouth, and this is nowhere more so than on the Web, where (mis)information spreads faster than a Florida wildfire.Well, now the folks at Web Cards - who produce postcards printed with an image of your homepage - have just added a new service to their site called Recommend It Here's how it works: You add a "Recommend It" button to your site, and when visitors click on the button, they are presented with a brief form to fill out. Recommend It uses robots to create an email message which is instantly sent to their friend recommending your site. Any fears you may have about presenting Recommend It with your email address, and thus attracting a well known processed "meat" product is assuaged by the site's rubrick:
"No Spam Guarantee This is quite a nifty idea, although it's apparent that it's not suitable for all sites. Long-in-the-tooth 'Net sophisticates will probably spurn the notion, but as the level of "Web savviness' declines, this could well be a shrewd way of generating traffic. The Recommend It site features their Top 10 and Top 50 pages. While they don't disclose figures on their member site traffic, they have many sites that they claim have generated well over 10,000 Recommend-It emails since they joined the service. July 27, 1998 Browserola!Everyone knows that different makes and versions of browsers render HTML differently, not to mention the differences imposed by competing platforms.The prudent site designer will keep several different browsers "on tap" so that viewing options are constantly available, and the design can be tweaked for optimum effect across a broad consensus of browsers. We all do that - don't we? Reasons for not keeping several versions of Netscape and IE, Lynx, Opera and a slew of others open to view completed pages range from "Not enough memory," to "Can't be bothered," to "Uh?". Here's Browserola v1.01 for Windows 95. This nifty little number "lets you view your HTML creations through the eyes of other browsers, without keeping a copy of each on your machine." ("Other browsers" are confined to Netscape and Explorer, but nonetheless...) You simply select the browser(s) you want to emulate, the HTML standards level, type in the file location and - voila! - Browserola checks the page. So now you have no excuse for having to slap a "Best viewed with..." button on your page. Unless you're working on a Mac, of course...
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