The Perfect Web Site!

by Moe Rubenzahl <moe(at)maxim-ic.com>

 Date:  Tue, 13 Feb 2001 10:42:16 -0800
 To:  hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org
 References:  simrad
  todo: View Thread, Original
The perfect website does exist. It's a site that accomplishes its 
marketing and communications goals.

To do this, a site needs to be viewable by the target audience. 
Sometimes that takes compromise. Sometimes it means we need to relax 
all the groovy graphics and recognize that we need to reach 
real-world users, with modems and lord-knows-what browsers.

It was hard reading through all the insults and condescension but the 
advocated design method is inherently problematic. The first messages 
advocated, as if it is standard practice, creating a big graphic and 
slicing it to make the page (examples such as mgm.com were cited).

Here are two examples:

   http://www.Rubenzahl.com/wwworks/images/Using-images/bad.gif
   http://www.Rubenzahl.com/wwworks/images/Using-images/worst.gif

These are screen shots of two pages made using sliced monster 
graphics -- viewed with graphics turned off, to show what users on 
slow connections or blind users will see. In the 'bad' example, they 
at least used ALT tags. (The guilty parties here are Kensington and 
MediaMetrix -- not small players).

Here is one that uses graphic content but augments it with enough 
text so you can see what's going on:

  http://www.Rubenzahl.com/wwworks/images/Using-images/good.gif

To round out the gallery, here is a site that is quirky and woefully 
imperfect. But the design technique used here could be considered 
perfect. Or at least, pure:

   http://www.interarchy.com

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