Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 28

East Lansing, Michigan
Do Spinning Globes Yield Superior Sites?

By Richard Wiggins

couple of years ago, my buddy Sue Davidsen and I were presenting our "Home on the Web" seminar to an audience of about 150 people. Sue does a really informative "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" section of our seminar. She puts up sample pages from a variety of Web sites - Coca-Cola, a public library in Ohio, a personal page from New Zealand - and discusses the relative merits of the design choices made by each webmaster. Usually the audience has a fairly consistent reaction to the sites:

• That background GIF obscures the text.
• The color scheme is hideous.
• The site layout and menus are really well designed - this site is easy to navigate.

In effect, Sue is conducting an informal focus group, leading a given audience through a semi-structured analysis of what works and what doesn't work for that particular audience.

I recall that during my portion of the talk that day, I mentioned that the trend on the Web was to try to reach the same level of interactivity as a CD-ROM, and to offer rich animations and moving graphics. "Have you noticed how every ad on television has only moving graphical elements on screen?" I asked. "Someday the menu buttons on our Web pages will dance like that, and we'll have to chase a button to click on it." We all had a nice chuckle over that notion.

Recently I was shown a site that makes extensive use of Macromedia Flash to impart a new level of interactivity and motion to the Web experience. I'd like to convene an audience and have Sue ask people whether they like it or not. And I'd like to know what you think about this site.

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