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The following is a message posted to the internet Marketing list.  

  Sanjay Kapur    (SK54)              |Internet:    Sanjay.Kapur@sunysb.edu
  Systems Staff, Computing Services,  |Bitnet:      SKAPUR@USB
  State University of New York,       |SPAN/HEPnet: 44132::SKAPUR
  Stony Brook, NY 11794-2400        |Phone:+1-516 632 8029, FAX:+1-516 632 8046

>Date: Mon, 03 Jul 1995 14:17:37 -0700
>From: Internet Marketing discussion list 
>Subject: Quality Web site Design - The Challenge
>Sender: glenn@popco.com (Glenn Fleishman)
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>To: internet-marketing@popco.com
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>
>From: marym@Finesse.COM (Mary Morris)
>
>I'm going to start by adding a metoo for most of what Susan said
>
>Susan Getgood also said
>> So, the first responsibility is to figure
>> out how your audience wants to consume your material. Example: if most of
>> your targets are on dial-up lines, you will be wasting your money on 50K
>> imagemaps -- no matter how great they are. Likewise, if your audience is
>> internet professionals with high speed lines, you probably don't want to go
>> to low-budget internet assistant do-it-yourself route
>
>However, at this point I'm going to jump in and say wait a second.
>It doesn't matter if you have high speed lines or not, pages don't
>need to be 100-300K to be good. Images add something to the page,
>but there is such a thing as graphical diareha. The images should
>add as much to the message as they take up. For example, if your
>logo is 40K and takes up a 1/3 of your home page, it should be
>carrying 1/3 of the message about your site. What does it say
>about you if 1/3 of what you want to get across is a name?
>
>Remember, that real estate on the first screenful is very important,
>as a good portion of the browsing public fast or slow, do not scroll.
>A good home page motivates people to go farther into the site.
>
>In addition, I will comment that having a high speed line doesn't
>mean that you have a high speed line all to yourself. There are some
>large companies (read 10,000+ people) that have only one T-1 connection
>to the Internet. That connection serves all of the quarter of a
>million email messages that pass through each day, all of the
>netnews that comes in, and web traffic for the roughly 20% that
>use the web regularly. Since in many places web access is considered
>to be "fun stuff", many people browse on their lunch hours or at
>the end of the day, creating traffic jams. My last experience in
>London was at a site that had an ISDN line -- that served 100 modems
>that were all in use at peak periods. 10 simultaneous users on
>a double wide ISDN is roughly equivelent to having a 14.4K line.
>100 users slows things to a crawl. Based upon my experience at
>some large sites, I will say that having a really high speed line
>at peak periods is roughly 2-3 times as fast as a 14.4k line - not
>10 or 100 times as fast.
>
>> IMO, natural selection is going to take care of the really ugly stuff.
>> It won't work, and it will go away.
>
>NOT! Unfortunatly, there is a lot of old stuff that just hangs around
>on the Internet. It doesn't go away by errosion, in some cases, it
>doesn't leave until someone declares it dead and is willing to fund
>the cleanup -- sort of like our toxic dumps right now. Don't assume
>that "ugly" stuff goes away.
>
>The Challenge
>=============
>
>After having heard all of this here, I'd like to know what
>does comprise a good site. I've asked this question before and
>received some very nebulous answers. I'd like to hear some hard
>and fast answers.
>
>Here's my list:
>
>- Minimal bandwidth impact without warning the user. This means keeping
>the home page to 40K regardless of the audience. It also means
>augmenting all of your pages with ALT stuff for the images and
>text alternates for _every_ imagemap. Ask the user if they want the
>assault. Don't just assume that they do, regardless of their
>speed. Remember, there are still a lot of people running with
>images turned off - even when they have T-1 access.
>
>- Test all graphics early and often on something other than a Mac.
>Macs make great images that turn to ugly glop when applied to a PC
>or Xwindows screen.
>
>- make sure that the images add value. A string of buttons in an imagemap
>doesn't always add value. An imagemap that shows the relationship between
>the different items does. Then like the abdicated King's
>wife (can't remember her name - Wallis something) did with her jewelry.
>Take a look at the page and remove one graphic.
>
>- If you must go for the photorealistic or the heavy shading
>philosophy, please use .JPGs instead of GIFs. ~75% of the Internet (ie
>Netscape and I think IBM) can read inline JPG. You'd be offending roughly
>the same percentage of the audience that you do by running high
>graphics sites to begin with, and giving them a lot better
>picture too.
>
>- Keep all navigation pages to one screen.
>
>- Don't mix content and navigation. Note: not all anchors are navigation.
>Navigation is a particular subset of all anchors, not every cross
>reference.
>
>- If you must go for the "experiencial" feeling site instead of
>a site that appeals to a person's rational side, use an appropriate
>medium. HTML was designed for text. Use VRML, Use Java. God knows that
>with the way technology is adopted on the Internet, 6-9 months from now
>more people will be VRML _and_ Java capable than will be able to
>consistantly receive data faster than 2k per second.
>
>- Remember that the web is a participatory medium. The audience
>isn't captive, and more often than not, you don't get their attention
>long enough to transfer the image of your site to long term memory
>without some significantly noteworthy item - ie not your logo.
>
>- Use your real estate wisely, and start developing for the
>laptop based browser.
>
>Mary
>
>----
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>
>
>

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