The Myth of Electronic Publishing

The metaphor, "electronic publishing", to describe the web, is simply wrong and the source of some of the worst design on the web because the techniques that work to make a successful printed page usually do just the opposite on the web.

When attempting to locate sites that are worth emulating you should be looking for successful sites and not sites that the viewer thinks "look good" based on their own subjective opinion. It's very easy to determine which web sites are successful - they are the ones with the most visitors. The 10 that I am going to examine are those listed on Web Pages That Suck (a leading site on web site design, www.webpagesthatsuck.com) based on Mediametrix's list of the top 50 web sites from July 1999. There are other lists but all they do is move some sites up or down a few spots. No one can reasonably question that these 10 sites are hugely successful.

When looking at these 10 sites there are a number of characteristics that they tend to share; not surprisingly most of these characteristics are discussed in the literature on web site design. An excellent crash course on web design was provided by CIO Web Business Magazine titled "Must Haves" at

http://www.cio.com/archive/webbusiness/080198_main.html

which discusses "12 essential" elements for a successful web site.

The top 10 sites were:

- www.yahoo.com
- www.aol.com
- www.msn.com
- www.geocities.com
- www.netscape.com
- www.go.com
- www.microsoft.com
- www.lycos.com
- www.excite.com
- www.angelfire.com

On the web, traffic may be prerequisite for success but does not assure success. While all top 10 sites from 1999 still exist in some form, some have been acquired or merged and no longer have an independent existence, have changed beyond recognition, or not available to the general public in the form they once existed. These are no longer linked to. None look like they did in late 1999.

All 10 sites are almost entirely text based with very limited use of graphics. The one graphic element that every top 10 site uses on every page is the site or company logo. The other graphics are limited to small navigation aids and paid advertising. Only one, Geocities, has a full size banner ad on its home page. AOL has 4 third to quarter size banner ads and Angelfire has three similar sized paid ads. Yahoo, Netscape and Lycos each have one tiny banner ad in a very prominent spot. Yahoo sometimes uses this spot for promotion of its own services. Other than Yahoo's use of its banner spot not one of these sites uses any graphic to promote its own services. Only two sites have any photographic image of any kind on its home page and these are tiny.

All use white backgrounds. Anglefire used to use a yellow so pale that off-white is a reasonable description; they have switched to pure white with some significant blue areas. Geocities uses some large pale yellow areas on a white background.

Yahoo, Geocities, Go, and Lycos use browser default text colors and fonts. The others stay with very conservative variations from the defaults, i.e. text and links are blue to dark blue, dark grey or black.

All fit comfortably in a browser window that would fit on an 800 x 600 monitor. Most would fit comfortably, i.e. without horizontal scrolling, in a 640 x 480 monitor.

All top 10 sites have small home page sizes ranging from 18K at Yahoo to 63K at Microsoft. Its interesting to note that the two largest home page sizes belong to sites with "captive" audiences. The next closest in size is MSN at 40K and is much smaller than the two relatively big ones. AOL (62K) has over 20 million members and when they install their software, the AOL home page is their home page; many/most users never bother to change their browser home page. Microsoft is the largest software company in the world and if you want authoritative information on their products, free downloads and upgrades or free tech support you go to their web site.

Not one of the top 10 sites looks like it was designed by a graphics designer. Everyone does look like it was designed by an experienced software designer. When you compare the appearance of the top 10 sites to any printed material, including printed material from these same companies, the web sites vary in look from plain to cluttered. Not one is "pretty" or "attractive" when compared to typical print media.

The web has often been referred to as "electronic publishing." This is wrong. Every web site is a computer application system regardless of whether its purpose is the delivery of information or the sale of products or services or some combination of these. The publishing metaphor comes from the days when web sites were made from a series of static pages. Today every significant web site has a large portion of dynamic content. Many important sites are totally dynamic in that every page is drawn from information in databases and programs which adapt to the users interest or allows the user to find information of particular interest or purchase products or services.

Even if a site is entirely static, if it is of significant size, it needs to organize its content in a manner that makes it easy for visitors to locate what they are looking for. Hypertext is inherently non linear in contrast to all print publications. Every page needs navigation aids or a consistent set of buttons or links to major areas of the site as well as ways to easily move to the next and previous page where sequential information is contained on more than one page. Every page should have a direct link back to the home page; remember one of the major ways that visitors find a site is from the search engines which will often take the visitor to a page deep within the site's structure. There is nothing analogous to this in the print world.

If the publishing metaphor was ever valid, it is now about three years out of date. All the experience and training that a graphic designer brings to designing web sites or pages works against creating a successful web design. A graphic designer is used to working in a medium in which he or she has total control of every element that appears on the printed page. Size, proportion, color and even paper stock are either specified by or known to a graphic designer.

None of these are knowable or controllable by a web page designer. Though all modern browsers allow the display of images and sounds the browser user can and often does turn these off. The browser user can override all color, font and font size specifications provided by a web page. Monitors range in size from 640 x 480 to 2000+ dimensions. Especially on larger monitors, browsers are rarely used in full screen mode and the browser window can be either horizontal or vertical in its orientation. Colors available range from 16 to millions.

In the print world, color costs more to produce, but except for this difference a magazine reader can flip past any page at the same speed. The designer must find ways to get the reader to stop on the page he or she is designing. The designer can apply every ounce of creative effort to catch the readers attention and there is no difference in delivery time of the most complex visual experience the designer can create and a single word in black on a white page.

In popular music, video and book cover design the graphic designer needs to do anything that works to get a potential buyers attention. A designer of brochures for direct mail or display racks has to get the viewers attention so the mail piece does not land in the trash unread or the brochure is picked up from the rack or table. Just about every thing that works for you in print works against you on the web.

What you need from the graphics design world is an understanding of basic color theory and some very basic typographic principles. These are that all uppercase is harder to read than mixed case, serif type faces are easier to read in large blocks of text than sans serif faces, good design resists the desire to use a wide variety of type faces, styles and sizes on one page and that you need to be very careful if you plan to use a light color text on a dark background. That's your instant course in graphic design for the web.

Every person reading this document is a computer user and each of you knows that one of the most annoying aspects of using computers is waiting for the computer to do something while you sit there. It doesn't matter if it's loading a large program on a slow computer, retrieving a really large word processing document, waiting for a report or large spreadsheet recalculation or especially waiting for the computer to reboot after a crash. Any time the wait is over 10 seconds the user is likely to start doing something else. At a minimum, attention starts to wander but the longer the wait the more likely the user is to do something else. For example, in a windowed environment, you might read e-mail while waiting for a report to finish.

Waiting for web pages is no different except the normal reaction to a really slow web page is to hit the "stop" button and go elsewhere. On a 56K modem the top ten sites home page load times range from 5 seconds for Yahoo to 19 for Microsoft, the slowest of the top 10. Microsoft has a massive amount of content relevant to the large majority of computer users and not available elsewhere; if you want this information you have little choice but to wait for Microsoft's home page.

The American Association of Critical Care Nurses, http://www.aacn.org, conducted a study of its member's internet access in mid 1999 and found that 30% were still connecting at 28K. Following their study they realized they had to make their site much faster. Their previous site looked like a very well designed association web site while their redesigned home page looked much like the top 10 web sites and not like a typical association web site. (Since this page was written in late 1999, AACN has reverted to a "pretty," graphics intensive, home page characteristic of most associations.)

The largest ISP is AOL and AOL is a slow service provider. If you've had a chance to compare web access from AOL and a fast ISP with similar equipment you will know that web pages download much faster through a fast ISP than through AOL. A reasonable estimate is that a 28K modem on AOL will take about three times as long as a 56K modem on a fast ISP.

Despite the growing availability of cable modems and xDSL, most web sites will not be able to ignore the needs of modem users for a number of years. International Data Corporation has predicted that by the end of 2002 one third of homes in the U.S. will have high speed Internet connections. This means that two thirds will still be web surfing with modem connections (or still not connected?)

Another factor to keep in mind is that in-house web sites appear much faster to the association staff than to the outside world. Typically an in-house web site will be no more than 3 hops away and connected at Ethernet speed or faster speeds. Ethernet is about 7 times as fast as a T1 line that typically connects the association to all the rest of the world. Even when association members are fortunate enough to have a "fast" internet connection (T1, DSL, or Cable with speeds from 200K to 1.5MB) they still see the web pages significantly slower than staff do because in addition to their slower line speed they typically going through 8 to 15 hops (routers, proxy servers, firewalls, computers) each of which adds a small delay. Also the bigger the web pages are, the sooner a T1 line will be saturated requiring a faster and more expensive connection to the Internet.

Regarding the use of plugins the book Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Yale University Press, 1999 says 'Do not produce web sites that depend on one browser technology or browser plug-in ("This site designed for Netscape 4.05, and ShockWave"). Such notes on the home page of a corporate or enterprise Web site look sophomoric and will drive away most users old enough to drive.' Generally this book is quite serious in its tone but the authors obviously have some rather strong opinions on home page plug-ins.

None of the top 10 sites use proprietary technology or plugins. Even the two major browser vendors, Microsoft and Netscape, have developed their sites so that they are fully functional with their competitor's browser; some of the scripting used on Microsoft does not work in current Netscape browsers but the site is designed so that these are only a convenience and not necessary. All of the top 10 sites have stuck with technology that will work with almost any browser from the past 3 or so years.

Today's web graphic tools make it very easy to do fancy graphic tricks such as buttons with bevels, highlights and drop shadows; all of these "cool" effects add significantly to size of each button. None of the top 10 make any significant use of any of these "cool" effects.

Readers may think that the top 10 web sites are so different from an association web site that it's not reasonable to make comparisons. Lets examine what the top 10 sites are. Seven are portals, two are free web hosting sites and one is the worlds largest software company. Microsoft could probably use lousy web design and still have a successful site though perhaps not in the top 10. They actually exceed their own recommendations on web page size.

What's a portal? It's a web site that attempts to organize the entire world wide web experience so effectively that web users will make the portal's home page the home page in the browser so that it is the first page the user sees. In addition to providing a hierarchical categorization of the web, each includes a search engine and at least some ability to personalize the portal home page to each user's special interests. Most include free e-mail, plus different kinds of chat or online forums. Basically these sites have nothing to sell but organization of the web but they do it so well that seven of them are in the top 10 web sites; who better to study for how to organize a web site.

Yahoo used to have direct links to major online vendors but not anymore. Now they have a shopping area. You can buy just about anything that's sold on the web through Yahoo but its not easy to get out of the Yahoo site. Yahoo is so big that if an online vendor wants to be included they have to partner with Yahoo. You might actually buy a book or tape from Amazon.com but you're still in Yahoo pages and Yahoo gets a cut of every sale made through it. Even if you do find the link directly to Amazon, I'd bet there is tracking so that Amazon still gives Yahoo its cut if you came from their site. Yahoo is so big that its virtually essential to be included if you want to be commercially successful on the web. They have done all this by being the best guide to finding other things on the Internet. They have always stayed a step or two ahead of their competition and I don't think it's any coincidence that the number one web site has about the smallest home page of any web site you can find.

Its interesting to compare the last 10 of the top 50 web sites to the top 10. These sites tend to be more focused on a single subject than the top ten but most of their design principles are pretty much the same. What separates 41 - 50 from 1 - 10 is that they tend to have a lot more graphics and have an average home page size that's almost twice the size of the top 10. Their average home page size is just a little smaller than Microsoft's home page. Still not really bad but these sites are typically among the leaders in their specific area and have lots of substantive content that appeals to a large audience. The www.websitesthatsuck.com page that used to discuss these is no longer available.

Another metaphor that's fundamentally wrong is "browsing the web." This suggests some casual meandering without any specific focus. My personal experience and observations of others is that nearly all web activity is purposeful in nature. There are five ways to get to a site: 1) type in a URL, 2) use a search engine, 3) follow a link, 4) select a favorite or bookmark, 5) select from your history list. The first two are clearly purposeful suggesting a deliberate action to go to a location that the user hopes has a particular type of information or product of interest. The fourth and fifth are even more purposeful because a user is deliberately returning to a site that they have been to previously and know what to expect.

The third is the only one that might take on a meandering quality. This occurs when the user clicks on a link that appears to lead to something unrelated to the user's original purpose. Even in this case, while the big picture may be one of not clearly directed action, each time a user selects a specific link they are making a choice to go to a location that they think has something of interest to them; it's not really relevant that the user has become side tracked from their original goal.

If you think about what "browsing the web" implies, why would any web site want casual browsers except to increase advertising revenue based on impressions? Traffic that has no interest in the content offered by the web site but only the site's appearance is of little value to the site. You should want visitors that are interested in your products, services or point of view. These are potential customers, members or supporters.

I hope I have succeeded in convincing readers of the need to make web sites clean and functional and to forget about trying to make them pretty or "designed". Every organization can choose between a site that staff and leaders think "looks good" and one that provides the maximum functionality for the members and the public that come to the site looking for information. It's the choice between a collective ego trip and making a site that compares well with the best that the web has to offer. I discuss the specific steps to make a site that will attract visitors, encourage return visits and build the audience versus an approach that drives away potential visitors in the "Web Site Layout and Organization" section.

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