The World Wide Web: A New Medium for Design

Tools

However, the mid to late nineties saw a dramatic rise in Internet use with every company and organisation wanting to make their presence felt on the web. This increased commercialisation of the Internet meant a greater need for well designed sites. Thankfully, at the same time HTML was becoming more versatile, allowing webpage designers to use new features such as tables frames, and animated GIFs (allowing basic animation). The release of Netscape 3 browser allowed greater control of typeface with the ability for the designer to specify fonts from a small selection of commonly installed typefaces.

HTML 4.0 saw the introduction of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and with it greatly improved control of typography. Working very much like style sheets in QuarkXpress in the webpage authoring environment, meant a designer could choose a typeface (still from a relatively small selection) as well as have control over line spacing, tracking, and the ability to fully justify text (common practice in print but until the introduction of CSS almost impossible). It also allowed precise pixel positioning of elements on a page using 'layers'.

However whether users would see these pages as the designer intended is another matter as early versions of browsers don't recognise such features, and later versions of different browsers display such pages differently.

For designers used to the control they have in print, designing for the web can be very frustrating.

Designers want what could be termed 'What I See Is What You Get', a system by which the typeface, colours and everything else that is determined by the designer appear as they were intended rather than as now, being customisable.

(Burgoyne and Faber, 1999)

The frustration of designing pages for different browsers as well as their different versions and platforms is set to get worse as different devices such as PDAs, telephones and television are all now have the ability to 'surf' the web.

However designers are often accused of to easily blaming their tools for these frustrations without taking the time to learn all that they can do. Some argue this approach can lead to creators becoming more concerned with showcasing their technical skills, using every special effect available, rather than finding solutions for their clients needs.

One piece of software that has revolutionised design on the web was Macromedia's 'Flash'. Whilst it may have solved many problems associated with web-design, it has also created many others.

Flash enabled designers to produce animation, introduce true interactivity and allowed them more flexibility in their designs. With a control over typography close to that available in print, it allowed the designer to embed typefaces within Flash files so that they could be displayed whether or not the user had them installed on their system or not. Their work could also now be resolution independent so it looked the same regardless of the users screen size.

However, Flash is not an integral part of web browsers, and it requires users to download a specialist 'plug-in'. This goes against the idea of the idea of the Internet as the great democratiser - designers insisting on such plug-ins and with it high-powered machines run the risk of alienating the majority of Internet users.

This was one of the central reasons for the failure of Boo.com - an Internet only clothing retailer that became a casualty of the 'dot com' collapse.

From the day it launched technology was a problem for the online clothes retailer. Originally it was supposed to launch in May 1999 but technical hitches delayed the unveiling. When Boo.com finally went live last November it's ambitious technology was there for all to see - if they could be bothered to wait for it to download

(Ward, 2000)

But it wasn't just the use of the technology that was to blame; it was in the way in which it was used. The site used an array of graphics, pop-up windows, and 3-D imagery that was all hard to navigate around, leaving its customers lost and unable to find their way back to a starting point.

The relative success of other online stores - Amazon being the most notable and their use of more simplistic designs highlight how it is not so much how a site looks, but how it works. In fact the level of compatibility is quite detailed on Amazon - every page has the option to view text only versions for those using slow connections, and the site works well in most browsers.

The increasing use of Flash on websites has also sparked a debate as to whether it discourages usability. An expert in this field, Jakob Nielsen, is one person who thinks many designers are abusing Flash:

It's poorly integrated into the hypertext medium, because you end up with two navigation spaces. You have the page navigation which is traditional hypertext, enabling you to click here to get to the next page, and click the back button to get to the previous one. But then you have the Flash navigation, which sort of sits inside of that other navigation - so if you click the back button, the entire Flash thing resets

(Jakob Nielsen, interview in Cre@teOnline magazine, September 2000)

He has other concerns with the way designers use Flash, such as the use of non-standard navigation elements in their work, meaning that most users miss them or get confused, and how by designers insisting on the using Flash, distracts them from concentrating on a sites core values.

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