To: "meyer@newslink.org" 
Cc: online-news@marketplace.com
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On Thu, 27 Apr 1995, meyer@newslink.org wrote:

> I don't mean to rip all the people selling fancy hardware, software 
> and services, but I thought it might be interesting to share the 
> results of a little experiment I conducted this week:

[...students given an hour of study and a copy of Mosaic]

> An hour later, from a dozen students never before exposed to HTML or
> any of the issues of how to design an effective on-line newspaper,
> came back a dozen very acceptable newspapers -- three or four of them
> much more than acceptable, in some cases almost as good as any that I see 
> on-line.
> 
> All they would have had to do to actually publish these papers 
> would have been to have a directory on some Web server somewhere and
> transfer their files there.
> 
> Did my students become experts? Hardly. This was just a sidelight in 
> a class mostly focused on information graphics. But if they, coming 
> in completely cold, could produce a complete national and international 
> summary page in 60 minutes, do we really have to worry about 
> mega-expenditures in people and equipment?

Well, yes, actually.

A few little things which you haven't considered.

Your students were creating what might amount to a text-based home page.  
Anyone can do that, and I recommend everyone in the world to try it.  
It's great being a part of the web community.

But you haven't made the sites interactive.  You haven't installed any 
links or graphics, and heaven knows, your students didn't need to scan in 
any original artwork.  You haven't considered server functions, payment 
mechanisms, ways of making a site more than just a bunch of (well-laid 
out) text.

If you were planning to charge a fee for your service, this wouldn't 
work.  If you were planning on bringing people to your site en masse to 
offer them something their competitors can't offer them, it wouldn't work.

If you were planning on keeping an archive, and enabling visitors to 
search that archive, it wouldn't work.

Do we need to invest in people and equipment?  You bet we do.  We need 
trained people who know how to fully communicate in this medium, and who 
know how to market websites on the web, in the rest of the Internet, and 
in the Real World .

We need bandwidth, and quality servers, and good cgi programming.

Just because the layout of many of the existing sites is extremely basic, 
and could be duplicated by a group of (presumably design-aware) students 
with an hour's training, doesn't mean that what they are creating is as 
good as the web *should* be.

The only thing we don't really need is a better (and more expensive) html 
editor.  As you've noted, that part of the gig is pretty basic.



Jay Linden                                           Phone: (416) 510-8948
Toronto, Canada                                  Fax/Modem: (416) 510-8949
Net Presence/Marketing/Netsurfing        email: jjlinden@gold.interlog.com
     

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