Critique of Web designs

Questions and answers

Audience: Hi, I'm Tom Anderson from S&C Electric Company. I was curious if any of you had any really good corporate sites that you might care to comment on or show us other than the publication types.

Resnick: I'd be happy to tell you about my two favorite corporate sites. One of them is the Stolichnaya Vodka site. That's www.stoli.com and...

Seybold: OK, we're going to try to find it while you're talking about it.

Resnick: The cool thing about the Stoli site is that obviously Stoli's in the business of selling vodka, and you can purchase a bottle of vodka on the Web, but the whole idea here is image advertising. You come, and you can play all these cool party games. You can mix your own drink for example. You won't get inebriated from it, but what you can do is you can post your drink recipe up on-line and people can vote it up or down. That's kind of fun. The idea is that the next time you go to a liquor store and you have the choice between Stoli and Smirnoff, you're going to reach for that bottle of Stoli. From what I understand vodka's a very popular drink of the X generation, especially young guys, college guys, so you can imagine how they are at the frat party playing around at the Stoli site. So I think that's ideal, a great example of target marketing.

And one of my other favorite sites is the Ragu site, you know Ragu spaghetti sauce, and that's www.eat.com. I think it's also www.ragu.. But one of the things that I love about the Ragu site is that no matter what you may think of the spaghetti sauce, they have a really fun site. Go on there, and a picture of Mama Ragu pops up on your screen. Here Mama was on the jar of spaghetti sauce for years and years and never said a word. You go onto her Web site, all of a sudden she has an attitude. Look at this: three things you should never skimp on: food, wine, smooching. Just remember this and you'll have a good life. The cool thing is, you click the reload button or you come back to the site, and you'll see another wise and witty saying from Mama. The other thing is they do a good job of getting people to come back to the site. They do this by offering people a free trip to Italy. You fill out the form, and give all your demographic information, that good stuff that advertisers love. Click on the button, and you enter a contest. You also subscribe yourself to the Mama Ragu mailing list. Then if you don't revisit the site in say, a week, you get a little note in your E-mail box that says what, you don't write, you don't call [Laughter]. I love this site. David, what do you think?

Cole: Both of those sites are wonderful. Of course, it kind of shows our different drugs of choice. My site is the Godiva site, www.godiva.com. I'm quite fond of chocolate. Many of these sites' addresses are as simple as that. You just put in the name of the company, and you can usually find it. This is a very, very well designed site. What is interesting about it is that the site's been up about six months and about six weeks ago, they completely redesigned it. They took the information that they had gleaned from having the site up for three-and-a-half or four months, and they designed a completely brand new site based on what they'd learned. I think that shows that this company, at the very least, is looking at the Web as an on-going effort, not something you slap up, i.e., the corporate version of shovelware. It's something much more important. It also has a lot of depth. You can, of course, order chocolate, and chocolate recipes and all of that, but I got to get my fix and sometimes, just looking at it on the screen is a lot less caloric than...

Seybold: Now, let me tell you what I'm missing from corporate sites. I'm an amateur photographer, so I'm interested in film, photography, and so forth. Kodak has got a wealth of information about films, picture taking techniques, things of this sort. Why couldn't they put that sort of stuff up on the Web? There's a ton of stuff up there for someone who's interested in their products. You could certainly organize it so you've got layers of stuff that would be attractive to amateurs as well as professionals. What they've got up there is pretty boring stuff.

Cole: And it's also heavily graphisized, so it takes forever to download.

Seybold: Exactly.

Cole: Not only is it boring, but it takes long to download.

Seybold: Right, right, whereas -- they've got meat. I want the meat, and they've not put the meat up.

Cole: No question about it.

Resnick: Yes. I want to point out that, believe it or not, one of the most popular corporate sites on the Web is the Federal Express site. People go there to track their packages. To me, that's about as exciting as watching paint dry. But the fact is, when your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight, you go over to that FedEx site, you know you come away with something of real value.

Seybold: And Federal Express has saved a ton of money with that, because otherwise they have to have someone answering the phone and dealing with you on the phone.

Resnick: Right, exactly.

Cole: I've also found that the U.S. Postal Service site is wonderful. I'm a big believer in address standardization and ZIP-plus-four, and I went out and bought all these desktop applications to run them. But I basically have to quit out of about 12 applications to get enough RAM up to run this thing. If I'm doing one address, it's horrible. So I go into the Postal Service site and I can get a ZIP-plus-four of any address, and it actually is better software than what I paid good money for with the desktop application. So the Federal Express and the Postal Service sites are enormously helpful, and they save these companies tremendous amounts of money.

Seybold: There's a little bit of tension in what we're talking about here because there's the fun aspect of the Web, the surfing, the pretty graphics, the writing letters and so forth, and there's the information and utility aspect of the Web. I guess that part of the differences and biases here is I find myself -- I've got limited time -- gravitating towards the things which have value to me; things which have information value or practical value, like tracking Federal Express stuff, and less to the recreational kinds of things. I don't have that much recreational time, and it gets divided among other kinds of things besides surfing the Web.

Resnick: I like to believe that the best sites are the ones that are informational and fun to surf. Which was the site that had the bananas that were dancing around?

Cole: That was word.

Resnick: Right. Believe it or not, people will come to a site just because of dancing bananas. But the reason they'll stay at the site is because it has great content.

Seybold: Right, and there's an example of a site I came to because it looked great, but I didn't come back to it because to me that's all it was.

Audience: Ken Kirschner with Silicon Graphics. Rosalind, you made the comment earlier that you thought people should continue to use the Netscape extensions because 70 percent of the browser market was controlled by them. With the America Online browser, and the CompuServe browser, and millions of new users jumping in the Net...

Cole: Don't forget the Microsoft browser.

Audience: Yes, the Microsoft browser. It's not actually bundled, it's in the Plus package. The question arises, should people continue to use Netscape as their design or should we start designing for a lower common denominator because these new browsers don't support those extensions yet?

Resnick: That's an excellent question, but Netscape has clearly emerged as the leader in the browser industry, and no matter what Microsoft is doing with its little Microsoft extensions, I think Netscape is clearly taking the lead. This is borne out by the fact that Microsoft apparently tried to buy a 20 percent stake in it and then get a seat on the board. Clearly, Netscape is the market leader. I believe that Prodigy is bundling the Netscape browser into its software as opposed to its own browser. I know that AOL is working to incorporate the Netscape extension so, I think it won't be long before every browser out there supports the Netscape extensions. I really think that Netscape is the leader in the market. I think that sites that try to design for the lowest common denominator are going to turn off more people than they attract.

Seybold: I think what's happening here is that the entrance of Microsoft into the marketplace is a catalyst. One of the effects of that catalyst is causing a coalescence around Netscape. Everybody else realizes that if they don't have common standards, they're going to get swamped. I think we are seeing very rapidly a sort of a two-camp world emerge here.

Cole: I used to be in the "do all the Netscape extensions, let the world be damned" camp, and I participated in a number of list serves. One of them is sponsored by Apple, and someone had promulgated the notion that you should use the Netscape extensions and let the last 20 percent or 15 percent or whatever it is fall by the wayside. Someone from Apple pointed out that if all software developers did that, there would be no software for the Macintosh. So I, being a Macintosh person since day one, decided that I had to modify my position. My current position is that a good Web site will be able to trap the fact that a Netscape browser has come in and deliver Netscape-enhanced pages for those browsers, and trap the fact that it isn't a Netscape browser and have a lower common denominator. I'm not talking about a button that says, low graphics version. I'm talking about the fact that in the HTTP standard, the browser type is a transmitted field. Trap that, and you deliver what the browser can use. That's a lot of work on the part of a Web master, but nobody said this was going to be easy either.

Audience: My name is Carlene Lynch from Innovative Solutions Group. I am really a little worried. Building a community means recognizing and respecting standards, and what I see a lot now is that design is far more important than the message. A lot of what I see up there is renegade code or non-conforming code. I started out thinking that renegade code was evil. I've modified my point a little too, but I am very worried about trampling standards for the design ethic: not enough meat and too much glitz.

Resnick: I guess I'm the evangelist for Netscape extensions here this morning. My view is that for now, I agree. If it's the case where you have a Netscape table on your page, and if somebody was viewing that table through an AOL browser, and the person could not actually see what that table was even trying to say, then you definitely need to create a duplicate page on your site. You know, click here to go to the non-Netscape page. I don't think that necessarily means you need to create duplicate sites or create a situation where your server sends out two different versions, depending on which browser it senses, but I do think that in the long term, more and more people will accept and more and more browsers will adhere to the Netscape standards.

The other thing we haven't talked about too much is Java. Java is that new programming line with designs developed by Sun, and we showed you a few examples. What Java lets you do is access, not only text and graphics to your local computer, but entire applications as well. What Java can do in the future is, even if you don't have a Netscape browser or a browser that supports Netscape, Java can actually send over the application that you need to run any kind of fancy stuff that's on that site. Maybe I'm an optimist here, but I think between six months and a year, it's not going to matter which piece of software you're using because it's all going to come to your computer over the network.

Seybold: I think there are two issues here which you raised. One is the question of the triumph of form over content. That is, people paying too much attention to glitz and not enough to content. Part of my objection to some of the sites we've looked at is that there isn't enough there there to make them really worthwhile sites for me. I think that's something we need to address over time.

The second issue is the question of the Netscape extensions, and you just mentioned Java. My view on this is that we are inventing this stuff now, and we need to keep moving it forward fairly rapidly. What has happened in a situation like that in the past has been that there was been a focal point for de facto standards, and right now that is Netscape. What will make Java successful is the fact that Netscape is going to include support for Java in the Netscape browser. That will make Java a de facto standard. That is good. That sort of dynamic movement is exactly what we should expect from the marketplace at this point, and that's how de facto standards get set. They get set by who has the biggest market share. What has to happen is the other browser people are going to have to keep up, and in an ideal world, they'd actually talk to Netscape so that they move along somewhat in sync. Failing that, they at least have to try to keep up. I think that if we don't keep supporting the new kinds of things, we won't make anything like the progress we could be making.

Cole: It seems to me that the folks at Netscape are pretty open about the codes they're going to support in upcoming versions. The 2.0 version of Navigator has all of the extensions that Netscape is going implement and that are now documented on the site. I open the question up to see if there are any developers in the room. It seems to me if I were developing a browser, I'd just match Netscape, function for function. I don't understand why that isn't happening.

Audience: Two comments. One, I'm getting crazy with everybody calling them Netscape extensions. Let's recognize the fact that what Netscape is doing is implementing the HTML 3.0 proposed specifications.

Seybold: Right.

Resnick: Right.

Audience: So it's not like they're inventing something of their own...

Cole: Blink is not a HTML 3.0...

Resnick: Right, no. But I think that the fact is, people call them Netscape extensions.

Audience: I recognize that, but what they are doing is matching the standards that we're in the process of being agreed on. Look at tables in NCSA Mosaic. They work just fine because NCSA Mosaic has implemented the HTML 3.0. Now yes, Netscape gives you some additional graphic design elements in that, but they still work just the same. A table looks like a table in NCSA Mosaic as it does in Netscape. In Netscape it looks a little fancier; you can play around with the borders, but they work the same way.

The thing I really got up here to talk about is, what I've seen so far this morning of the sites that you've gone to is that you still have that print sort of thing. I'd like to suggest, and I don't know whether you've checked it out or not, but one of the things that is very exciting to me is realaudio. The concept here is streaming audio, so you can go to Real Audio site. You can start listening to a news broadcast, but you don't download the whole audio file. It streams to you as it comes down, and this works just fine over at least 28.4 modems.

Cole: Don't try it at 14.4. Let me guarantee you.

Audience: 28.8 works perfectly. You can then change pages and go to different places while the audio is still playing. This to me is the really exciting sort of stuff here, because this puts a very different spin on what is, in certain aspects, still considered a mimic of a print thing. You talk about the graphics and this, that and the other thing, and I understand about the hyper-linking, which you don't get in print, but this adds another media element. This to me, is really utilizing multiple media.

Audience: You asked if there were any developers here, so I am Liam Quinn of SoftQuad. I don't want to start a fight about Netscape, but I felt I should just reply. First, no. Netscape is not just implementing HTML 3 extensions. They are beginning to do that now, which is wonderful. And they are just beginning to participate in the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force working group for HTML, which is formally responsible for the standards of HTML. Netscape's not actually responsible for the Internet standard. A lot of their earlier extensions, such as center for example, are not part of HTML 3 because of serious problems in other browsers. Things that you might want to send through as a separate paragraph, for example, a legal disclaimer, won't appear in another browser, or will appear as part of another paragraph. So yes, Netscape is quite open. They gave us more than a week's notice listing some, but not all of their new commands, many of their new tags [Inaudible], many of their new tags, still not documented. That's why the other developers are behind Netscape, time-wise. Whether you develop your pages for Netscape users and say 30 percent or 40 percent or however many people at this site are not going to be able to see it, or whether you say we don't care, we're just going for a closed community, or we're just going for these people, I think is up to you. I don't think it matters.

Resnick: Netscape controls something like 75 percent of the browser market, and I expect that either their market share will continue to grow, or the other browsers will simply adopt their standards or the HTML 3 standards, so I feel the closed community you're talking about is going to be an open community that encompasses virtually everybody on the Web before too long.

Seybold: I guess the presumption here is that what Netscape has, everybody else will have with some time life.

Resnick: Right.

Seybold: That may or may not be a valid assumption, but if that's a valid assumption, that makes things a lot easier.

Audience: All right, thanks. The Braille browser is a good example of one that's not, for example, going to implement the funk changes.

Seybold: Yes, exactly.

Audience: My name is Tom Holling from Kodak. All I want to say is, Jonathan, give us another chance. Just like Godiva chocolates, we've redesigned our whole content last Wednesday. You'll see a wealth of content underneath the Kodak page. So please, give us another shot.

Audience: I'm Morris Kinesavich with Reid Travel Group in New Jersey. Rosalind, you were just saying about Netscape emerging as a standard that the other browsers may follow. I'm looking at this technology and thinking that it is really nothing more than read-only word processors that have hyper-text links within them. As such, why not have as part of an HTML standard, something that identifies the format that's used within the page, so that say, if I'm using Microsoft Word and opening up a WordPerfect document, Microsoft Word will recognize and use the appropriate filter that I've installed to open up that page and format it appropriately. That allows me to use whichever word processor I want. Perhaps the browsers should be implementing the same kind of...or HTML should be implementing a similar kind of I don't know what to call it, but...

Cole: Well, what they're calling it is style sheets. And it's in the HTML 3.0 proposed standard. Of course, we have yet to really have adopted 2.0 so that's 18, 24 months out there. But I definitely suggest you take a look at the site www.w3.org which is the World-Wide Web site that has all of the HTML standards on it, and you will see a whole discussion on style sheets which addresses what I think you want to address.

Seybold: I think there's another issue here, and that is that, regarding the WordPerfect-Word example, we're dealing there with a relatively stable world. WordPerfect data formats don't change every six months. They can't, because WordPerfect has to deal with all of the legacy documents people have created within WordPerfect. Part of what makes this so difficult right now is that we are changing things every six months. It's very dynamic and there are new things coming very rapidly. We don't want to freeze things at the point where you could say, well, this is special legation, this is what Netscape does or this is what Spyglass does, and this is what they'll do for the next six or nine or 12 months, because that's not going to be the case.

Resnick: I think we're at a very early stage of Web development. This battle over standards is going to be a mute point maybe six months to a year from now. If Java takes hold, Java's going to be able to send you whatever players or viewers or browsers you need to see everything on a particular site. In the not too distant future, it's going to be the server, the network, that's delivering not only the content, but the tools that you need to experience that content. I hope this whole worry over standards is going to be just a footnote in history before too long.

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