Learn from the pioneers- what's wrong with some Web pages?

What's wrong

Several great resources are available to guide Web design, including David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites and Flanders & Michael's Web Pages That Suck. Some of these guides become dated as technology and standards progress, but we can gain insight into effective content creation by examining some basics.  Some of the major reasons why some Web pages I've seen have been a disappointment:

• Most of us aren't very good at writing, designing and producing documents
• HTML doesn't help, and it changes all the time
• Good content is expensive
• People who can pay for content usually want to sell something
• Good tools are still elusive

Designing and writing is hard

Most Web pages are static documents, because the nature of the Web makes interactivity difficult. Programmers want interactivity. Future Web software will allow more two-way communication, but for now, creating a Web document is something like writing a magazine article and very much like writing on-line documentation. Interactivity is often disguised as animation, or control of a view into a canned scene, or the use of some form to setup non-realtime communication. Useful VRML worlds and faster communication will facilitate interactivity in the future. However, in the realistic present, we must design to emulate the interactive experience. Hopefully we will not create another passive TV culture.

How many people know how to design a hypertext document? What sites have you found to be truly hyperactive?

To create a document worth reading and worth looking at, you must have some writing skill. You must have information to present. You must do some content design, navigation design, and layout design. You must reread, rewrite, and improve. Clearly, this requires time.

My own home page of course contains examples of bad information design and good information design. For a bad example, look at the page that presents some of my family's favorite links. It's just a list of links with some quick graphics designed to enhance interest. The links present the reader with little information about what's at the other end. Lists of links can be useful, and even visually appealing, but they should present concise summaries, must be filtered carefully, and checked often.

Perhaps an even better example is this document. This page is more like a standard written essay, with some information and a few links that make putting it online worthwhile. You can read it straight through. You can follow references by following links. It doesn't use images at all, but it really doesn't need them. Design that serves the need of a page isn't automatically boring (but it may not be visually exciting).

Let's assume the average Web page author has something to say (much too often this is not the case at all, and at that point the author must do some more homework and develop context). How well is he or she going to present the body of information? Many people can't write succinct and useful e-mail messages. Why would anyone expect them to write decent Web pages? They can't spell. They can't write complete sentences. They can't make coherent arguments. They're programmers, not writers, and creating a Web document requires a writer's skills, and perhaps a designer's skills.

Taking advantage of the Web's multimedia capabilities is even harder. I very often don't know how to do it, and I have been practicing for years. Only a few sites get it consistently pleasing while efficient. Disgusting tiled background images and huge graphics that display text in a revolting font and hideous graphical bars don't count as "taking advantage".

HTML isn't just HTML anymore

HTML is an SGML DTD (in non-nerd language, "Standard Generalized Markup Language" and "Document Type Definition"). SGML was designed for government document production and such lethargic prose. SGML defines a document's structure. It doesn't care much about how the document looks on the page (or screen). The DTD sits on top of SGML. It defines the ways you can tag text and objects. It includes style-defining tags (like <i>) and content-describing tags (like <strong>). To interpret these tags, every Web viewer (browser software) is expected to understand all the syntax.

HTML has changed vastly in the years since I started writing Web documents. When I started, I couldn't center anything. Or flow text around images, or even put a block of text next to an image, or display two columns. With HTML 3.0, I can do all these things. HTML 3.2 gives improved control over how  pages look. HTML evolved from SGML, and both were specified to control structure and not appearance. The reality is, it doesn't much matter that HTML is an SGML DTD. People don't think of it that way. People want a markup language that's platform independent, gives them a mix of structural and visual tags, and lets them do what they want to do. Dynamic HTML is beginning to address some of these issues, but the general community of users (i.e., old and new browsers of many varieties) are not ready for the newest HTML 4 or browser extensions.

So far, so good. Now we get to a stickier matter: The browser viewer decides how to display your HTML, not you. Design decisions about displaying tags are made by the programmers who wrote the viewers. Some viewers display the <em> tag as italics; some display it as underlined text. You, the document author, have no control. You can't pick good fonts. You can't decide how far to indent that block quote.

Even worse, some browsers support a whole range of tags that aren't in the HTML standard and aren't interpreted by other browsers. The worst offender here is Netscape, which routinely runs ahead of the standards committee. Sometimes I like what they do, but sometimes they cause hell. Netscape-tweaked pages can look like garbage when you look at them with other browsers.

The problem: You can't predict what your page is going to look like to the person on the other end of the wire. So even if you wanted to make your documents look good, you couldn't do it.

Good content is expensive

Here's the biggest problem.

You've got the ability to put up a document that the entire world can look at. You can put text in it. You can put images in it. You can put sound in it. You can even put small movies in it. What do you do?

Do you have anything to say?

If not, why are you doing a Web page? Maybe you just want to show that you know how to create html. If that's it, then practice technique. You are not ready to publish, unless you can identify your audience, and figure out what to say. How will come along. However, for now you have nothing to say. The very fact that you are reading this implies that you really do have something that you want to share.

So suppose you do have something to say. Do you have the time to say it well? Any good writer will tell you that quality requires iteration. You have to be willing to write, rewrite, and rewrite again to produce an excellent document. Nothing is right the first time. You have to tweak, fidget, and adjust at least a little unless you are a gifted writer. Quality requires a time investment. I find this to be a powerful point. First drafts are rarely perfect drafts.

If you do take the time to produce high-quality content, are you willing to put your stuff out there for free? If you have valuable information, you might not want to. If you want to publish what you're writing in the future, you probably don't want to stick it into a Web document. So I suspect that people who can produce good things (or think they can) may be reluctant to give them to the world. And then there are those of us who get fulfillment in publishing for our audience. The Web does not have to be treated like an international publishing project. If you just want to provide your friends and family up-to-date information on your kids and pets, the Web may be just the place. But it still will require thought and attention to do the job well.

Beware corporations bearing Web pages

There are people out on the Web now who have an incentive to give slick things to the world. These people want to sell you something. They're advertising their corporation or their product or their service, and they've decided they can ride the trend of the month by doing it on the Web. The home pages for various browsers are now blotted with advertisements for unrelated products. Neat Web services that were once freebie student projects, like Web indexers and reader-created Web directories, are now showing up with "brought to you by" tags. The ostensible reason is that hugely popular services need subsidies to buy the beefy hardware needed to keep them zippy. We should understand motives of some contributors, and the workings of incentives, while not abandoning the idea of the collaborative, and mostly free, Net.

It's the wave of the corporate-owned 90s. When San Francisco's PBS station began running 30-second advertisements, I knew we were doomed. PBS TV has marathons of groveling for money, while pretending to abhor commercials. Advertising is ubiquitous now. Everywhere you turn on the Web, some clown is trying to get you to buy sugar-water so you can be cool. The dolts in the US Congress are trying to clean up all this nasty many-to-many communication on the Net to make the Web safe for consumerism. After all, we would not want to have a world-wide exposure to sex. It would be a scandal.

You can pay for quality on the Web. That's pretty clear. Some of the commercial sites are pretty slick. Check out the Victoria's Secret Catalogue, to choose a commercial site with some appealing visual presentations. It was done by pros with any eye for class, showing off how artists could work with technicians to produce marketing slicks in a new medium. It's lush. It doesn't suck. It sells products. But it may not be the best style for all messages.

What I really care about is individual communication and expression on the Web. I do welcome the development of new technology, and the efficient application of design for sites. But what I really like is the personal touch, and the heartfelt expressions. If corporations can provide such services, all the better. But I do not look forward to the day when people will search the Web looking for entertainment jewels over content. That would be like watching the Super Bowl for the commercials.

I want to hear what they have to say. The Net is precious because it gives ordinary human beings a way to communicate with other ordinary human beings. Corporations already have too many ways to cram their ads down my throat. Human beings have the Net.