Critique of Web designs

HotWired

Seybold: Welcome to our Siskel and Ebert of Web sites with Cole and Resnick, rather than Siskel and Ebert. The premise of this session is to give you a quick look at a bunch of Web sites that have been selected after argument and discussion back and forth and so forth, and to have some back and forth about what's good and what's bad about these sites. There will be, as you're going to see here, some cheating on this. A, because most of the stuff is going to be downloaded on T1 lines, or in the case of David's stuff, cached, because we don't want you to have to put up with the download time that would slow the whole thing down. We will try to make comments as we go along about which ones are fast and which ones are slow, because that's a really important issue for all of us who do this stuff on regular modems rather than high speed lines. What we're going to do go through these sites and have some discussion about each one. So shall we start?

Resnick: The first site we're going to look at is HotWired. HotWired launched last October, and by Internet standards, I would consider it to be the grand daddy of interactive publications. Internet years are kind of like dog years, anything that launched in October was about a million years ago. But HotWired was the first on-line publication to pioneer the true multimedia style. It has text, it has graphics, it has sound, it has audio. It has just about anything you would look for in an interactive publication. HotWired is fun to surf, and every time you go to HotWired, you see something new. The homepage, the front page, changes and gives you a different view of the site. Now, you can either enter the site through any of those icons, or you can go above to overview and click on that. Now one thing that HotWired pioneered was the registration model, and advertising as well. One of the things that has made HotWired so successful is its ability to attract paid sponsorships for advertisers willing to pay $15,000 a month to reach HotWired's base of nearly 300,000 registered subscribers.

Now, one of the interesting things about HotWired, from a design point of view; is it has one of the classiest homepages out there. It's slick, it's well-designed, it's innovative, at the same time, it takes almost no time to download from your screen. We're going in at 28..8, but even at 14.4, these icons come over very, very quickly. So not only does it use a lot of cool multimedia tricks, it is user-friendly, even to people with relatively slow modems.

Another cool thing about HotWired is the interactivity. We can click here on Threads. HotWired was also one of the pioneers of interactivity on the Web. You click on Threads, then you can have the same kind of message board discussion back and forth that you could with publications on CompuServe, Prodigy and America On Line. A lot of publications have hyper-news, hyper-mail, and Web chat today, but HotWired was the pioneer back in October.

HotWired is not resting on its laurels. Another thing I really like about HotWired is that it's continually pushing the envelope, both editorially and technologically. And one of the cool things it's experimenting with now is Java. Now, if you take a look at little tumbling letters there, you know, that's a little parlor trick, to be sure, but at the same time, it's a taste of things to come. And one of the other things that HotWired is doing with Java is it has its own interactive chat room. You know how it is when you go to Web chat, and you're not sure that a conversation is even taking place? Well, with this Javatized chat room that HotWired just put up, you can actually have lines of text scrolling down your screen. So you're beginning to approximate America On Line on the Web. So, with Java, we've finally come that far.

I think that HotWired is an outstanding example of interactive publishing on the Web, and I feel that it definitely deserves two thumbs up. At the same time, the only hesitation I have about it is that the style it pioneered in October is the style it has today. And while it may be fine for a print publication to have the same look and feel year after year, I'm concerned whether the HotWired model is going to be HotTired before a couple months go by. David, what do you think?

Cole: Well, I think that there's no question that HotWired has done some very interesting things. The Java stuff is just unbelievable. So of course, I kind of wonder why you would want to have an AOL-type chat room on the Web when you could have something a whole lot better than AOL. Nonetheless, you've got a lot of very deep thinking about the Web going on, a lot of really, really good content. And I really disagree with you in terms of the issue of design. I think that, much like a print publication, the design has to be there a while to give people a feeling of familiarity. I mean you go to a magazine and maybe it will re-design once every five years. A newspaper might not re-design even once a decade. I think if HotWired lives for another six months with this design -- I agree with you in terms of dog years and Web years, there's definitely that -- but in terms of design, I think that HotWired can live for another six months or so with this design and not look too bad at all. So you vote, what?

Resnick: Well, I vote two thumbs up. I think that HotWired is here to stay and will continue to push the envelope, both in terms of content and technology.

Cole: I don't know, I can't give it two thumbs. Maybe one thumb. Jonathan?

Seybold: I've got a question for both of you. First of all, on the design side, my feeling is that the Wired design aesthetic works better on-line than it does in print. I like the design better on-line than what they do in print.

Resnick: Yes, I agree with that.

Cole: There's no question the aesthetic does not work well in print.

Seybold: One thing that bothers me about it is I'd like there to be more depth. They tend to do very short kinds of articles. And I'd like to be able to go in more depth on some of the stuff that they do.

Cole: I think that's an issue of not fully comprehending the benefits of HTML and the hypertext environment. There's no question that you can produce a little 250-word overview, but you put links in to give that depth.

Seybold: Exactly.

Cole: And the links just keep going down and down and down.

Seybold: Exactly, and that's the thing I miss with this site.

Resnick: I'm not sure if I agree with that. The fact is people like to surf and play on the Web. They really don't like to read. And while I think that rich sites and links to everything are important, at the same time, you don't want to bore readers. Otherwise they're going to hit that stop button and surf on by it.

Seybold: We agree to disagree. What's your next site?

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