Resist the “Because It’s There” Syndrome

Do you remember the first time you were embarrassed by a computer? Our lead author does.

I created an advertisement in the 1985 version of Ventura Publisher and placed three solid lines below the headline. It was ugly. U-G-G-L-L-Y. Why did I do it? Because as I was investigating the dialogs, I noticed that the Ruling Line Below dialog supported the creation of up to three rules and a thickness of up to 12 points.

If it could do it, I had to do it. I fell victim to the “Because It’s There” syndrome: use of a feature based on availability, not need or appropriateness.

The Web is full of opportunity to succumb to this dreaded disease, with the following zingers lurking behind every cybercorner.

Stop the Music Did you know that one of the elements you can define as a background is a WAVE or MIDI file? When the background loads, a song or other sound plays. This would be mildly tolerable if the browser knew to only play the sound once for each visit to the site, but it doesn’t. Instead, any time you refresh the page or return to it after visiting another page, it plays again. One colleague used a WAVE file of Daffy Duck saying, “This time, you push a button.” This was very clever and amusing...the first time. But to hear it every time you hit the page is enough to compel you to rip the sound card out of your PC. And don’t forget, a 45KB WAVE file (which would be a very small snippet of sound) requires just as much download time as a 45KB graphic.

We are not making a blanket condemnation against the use of sound, but if you have designed a page that is likely to serve as a frequent landing point (like many home pages), remember that any sound embedded on that page will play every single time that a visitor returns to it.

Eat at Joe’s When you see a scrolling banner on a Web site, does it not remind you of that time a few decades back when you first saw a bi-plane flying over the coastline with a trailing sign telling us all to buy a truck, listen to 103.7, or yes, eat at Joe’s? Like the use of sound, a scrolling banner can be an effective way to announce a genuinely significant event that would interest visitors to your site. Microsoft used a scrolling banner to announce the introduction of Office 2000. It included the number of copies that had been sold that day. That was an impressive use of a scrolling banner because it got the point across while also providing potentially interesting information.

Many times, however, scrolling banners feel more like the old bi-planes with that schlocky message about something we should buy. If you consider the use of a scrolling message, make sure it conveys properly the value of your product or service as well as your image as a marketer.

You Are Visitor No. 5!

Why is it so important for Web sites to advertise their traffic? We can think of two reasons: to show potential advertisers the value of sponsoring the site, and to tell us how much company we have. Okay, fair enough—we’ll set aside the fact that jimmying these meters is easier than rebooting a computer. So now the question is this: Why is it so important for these same sites to notify us in the most ghastly and ostentatious way? Why must it be done at headline size and with ornate graphics flanking both sides of a digital odometer that looks like it belongs on a billboard?

The height of embarrassment, of course, is when these obnoxious announcements tell us that we are the fifth visitor to this site since its inception 10 months ago.

Read This, Read This, Read This, Read This

There is no polite way to say this, so we’re just going to say it. If you create a page with blinking text, you deserve to have a virus eat your hard drive.

The Whole World Is Watching

As we conclude this chapter and this part of the book devoted to the World Wide Web, we must make one parting admonition. When you experiment with Web designs and you place them on your server, you are essentially practicing in public. We have addressed the pros of the Web’s immediacy; this is one of the cons. It is so easy to publish on the Web that you have to guard against displaying pages that are not yet ready. You need a tangible checklist for completing projects:

•  Are your pages as well written as they can be?

•  Do they use graphics appropriately and as efficiently as possible?

•  Do they require hardware that your target audience is likely to have?

•  Are you sure that your pages will open quickly enough when they are placed on the Web?

•  Have you chosen an effective background? Is there sufficient contrast? If the page has a lot of text, have you considered black text on a white background?

•  Have you avoided ugliness by playing it safe when in doubt?

•  And once again for good measure, are your thoughts and ideas communicated as effectively as possible?

Until all of these conditions are met, your pages should remain in your laboratory, not on the Web. Start by building them on the PC that you are most comfortable working on. If possible, move your pages to a lesser machine, like a notebook with limited resolution and colors. The next step is to place them on your Web server (whether it is on a local machine or the one that houses your Web site at your Internet Service Provider). But don’t locate them where the public can see them yet. Create a private directory whose name nobody else knows. Connect to the Internet and browse to that private directory to see how your pages look and how quickly they open.

Now you are ready to place your Web pages in their rightful homes. Now you are ready to proudly represent your business in cyberspace.