Re: backgrounds (fwd)

Once upon a time Mary Morris shaped the electrons to say...
>If we really had good numbers on this, the media would be all over
>this worse than Bob Metcalf's Crash of the Internet or last years
>Internet Business Gold Rush Bust. Shall we just sit here and 
>complain, or shall we band together and prove statistically that
>distractions are detrimental, not beneficial. 

Example: Livingston's web is 3.2 compliant.  If it doesn't validate, it
doesn't go on my server.  Period.  Now, I'm seriously considering using
some JavaScript to do client side form's validation on a few pages - I
consider that a functional tool, not whiz-bang stuff.

Aside from that I was avoiding tables until recently to give the users
more time to upgrade.  Now I use them and try to provide alternatives where
possible, but looking at my useragent logs I'm doubting the worth of those
alternatives.

In any case, that's how it is.

Now, both the VP of sales and the head of Customer Service have come to
me and said they want to 'jazz it up' a bit.  The CS head calls the idea the
'George Lucas' web.  Meaning animations, Java applets - anything users and
point at, click on, prod, or watch do something.  As well as better - ie
flashier - graphics.

(Ok, I admit the current graphics are sort of lame, I doodled them on a
whiteboard and another person did them in Illustrator and Photoshop in a
couple of days - when I got the web I also have a less than 2 week time
frame to completely overhaul it from the old design, gifs were my last 
concern.)

I admit I would love to work on all that whiz-bang stuff.  I love toys,
and I like learning new things.  So it sounds like fun to me.

My compromise is this:  I'm freezing the current web at 3.2 for the
forseeable future as that is fairly well supported by as large number of
browsers (and growing).  New info will continue to be added, just as if
that were the only site.

Concurrently we will develop and deploy the whiz-bang web, probably early
next year, and we'll use the bleeding edge technology, and maybe some of
the proprietary tags (maybe), there.  So people who like the whiz-bang
can use that, I get to have some fun and learn more things (knowledge is
always a good thing, IMHO), and the 'low tech' web will continue to exist
for people just looking for information.

-MZ
--
Livingston Enterprises - Chair, Department of Interstitial Affairs
Phone: 800-458-9966 510-426-0770 FAX: 510-426-8951 megazone@livingston.com
For support requests: support@livingston.com  <http://www.livingston.com/> 
Snail mail: 6920 Koll Center Parkway  #220, Pleasanton, CA 94566
See me in person: Internet Expo, Boston, MA, October 16-17, Booth 422 ;-)

Received on Thursday, 5 September 1996 12:44:00 UTC