At 5:57 PM -0800 1/12/99, Thomas G. Lockhart wrote:
>You're not off the hook that easily. We have already acknowledged that
>we are design-impaired. And a good book on design won't cure us. So we
>are trying to survey web sites and propose candidate looks. Got one or a
>few to suggest which have the right look?
Well, now that you mention it, http://www.yahoo.com and
http://home.netscape.com aren't bad. Give or take some mandatory
advertising, the actual information dominates the layout, they don't have a
lot of separate inclusions so they load pretty fast, and the headings and
information organization are understandable. Also variable news links are
nicely separated from the stable core headings.
I'd still give mulberrytech the edge as a site type similar to Postgres.
Clear menu on the left, nice introduction on the home page, and a really
elegant restrained color scheme. If you wanted to add some javascript
highlighting to the menu it might be nice, but it would slow the load
time---not a clear win.
I really think you'll have a hard time beating this one. Some variations
are whether you use frames to separate the menu or not and putting the menu
on the right/top/bottom instead of the left.
Different issue:
As a Mac user I feel compelled to point out that the Mac made it easy to
build documents with gratuitous font changes and allowed amateurs to foist
their experiments on all of us. The Mac, like the Web, is just a tool and
it's still the responsibility of the person using the tool to use it
correctly.
Font changes can be good, for example to distinguish headings from body
text. The need to do that, and the limited font support on the web, are a
major reason many designers use graphics for the header text (look at just
about any of the pages on http://www.apple.com, or notice that the
mulberrytech menu header items are graphic but the subbullets are text).
Come to think of it Apple's web site deserves study. The home page is a
bit splashy, but once you get past it they have a lot of good useful stuff,
it has a pretty clear layout, and a lot of it is dynamically generated to
boot.
Signature failed Preliminary Design Review.
Feasibility of a new signature is currently being evaluated.
h.b.hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu