From a user standpoint, icons should blend seamlessly into the background. That is, good icons, whether Vista icons or not, have obvious and unobtrusive meanings. Yet it’s difficult to anticipate a user’s reaction to an icon given the varying levels of computer and image literacy among technology users (e.g., just about everyone). Sometimes, the best solution for a company building an interface or product is to customize their application icons to their concepts. One company that will create customized icons is Professional Icons.com. Check them out and view their portfolio here.

Check back next month for more information about Vista, Mac, Linux, and XP icons. 

Mr Berners-Lee said that he intended to use the event to talk about plans for the Semantic Web - the second Internet revolution - which would enable software to understand Web content.
In the past, data formats have become useless after a short time, but with the correct understanding, data is usable indefinitely.
He said not only did society need the persistence of Web information to support outdated products, the data allowed historians to keep track and makes politicians accountable for their promises.

But when people linked to a site today, they did not know whether it would still be accessible in five years, he said from his home in the United States.
Mr Berners-Lee, who directs the W3C, is worried about servers keeping old addresses.
“It is a question of organisations really committing to being responsible,” he said.

Looking back more than a decade, some of the early Web information had been lost and Mr Berners-Lee had to explain to people how rudimentary it was.
“To have some persistence of that (data) is important for lots of different reasons,” he said.
Tomorrow, Mr Berners-Lee - famed for the development of hypertext mark-up language (HTML), the universal resource locator (URL) and the first Web browser - will speak on a variety of issues.

He is excited about pending developments including the Semantic Web, a way people could write programs to search databases and draw conclusions or create applications to ask computers to bill companies automatically.

Machines now scan a Web page but cannot pick out which number signifies a price, a stock quote or the temperature because the data is meaningless to them.
Also, Web services are a concept which use the Semantic Web to allow machines have conversation over interactive sites. Instead of asking surfers to fill out boring forms with name, address, credit-card information and so on to buy a book, programmers will be able to write code that lets a PC scan sites for the cheapest copy and buy it.

“I think it will be two years to three years before it really starts to spread across electronic commerce and people looking back at it say: ‘Oh, that was the Semantic Web revolution’,” said Mr Berners-Lee, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Another exciting development was voice technology allowing for e-mails to be picked up or sites browsed without a screen.
“In the next year or two, I would expect to see voice applications which will take you through e-mail,” he said.

But the Semantic Web was a lower hurdle because information would be put out in a form that was easier for machines to process, he said.
The Web standards group is working on ways to make it easy to access the same information from computers and hand-held devices, which some have said will lift Asian Internet penetration past US levels.

Mr Berners-Lee believes portable units will be a huge force in the future, but big screens - such as high-resolution televisions and computers - will not go away.
Despite his technology background, Mr Berners-Lee worries about the Web’s social impact. The Web, despite its promise, was not a magic bullet for the digital divide, he said. Internet access added one more item to the list of advantages, such as health care and clean water, enjoyed by wealthy nations.
“I think the richer countries have a duty to help the poor countries get Internet access as well as the other things,” he said.
But at the same time, Web development needs to balance harmony and diversity.

“The diversity of cultures in this world is really important. It’s the richness that we have which, in fact, will save us from being caught up in one big idea.”
For example, if a problem arises that stumps one culture, another might have the perspective to solve it. Some cultures tended to try to control the dissemination of information via the Web before realising it did not unseat old values or remove the need for government.

“They see it as a potential threat because it is a new medium that might upset the way things work, but then it, in fact, opens the discussion,” Mr Berners -Lee said.
About 1,100 people are expected to attend tomorrow’s conference. Organisers have attempted to give it an Asian flavour with the emphasis on regional speakers and issues.

Before the Web, only the technically skilled could navigate the Internet. Berners-Lee’s remarkable insight was to use hypertext to jump between different pages on the Internet. The concept of hypertext, which allows words to be linked to other words in the same file or different files, had been around for 30 years or so and had already appeared in a few programs.

Berners-Lee saw that hypertext could be applied to the Internet. This was done by means of three simple bits of technology known by their acronyms: URL (Universal Resource Locator), which gives each Web page a unique address; HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), which is a protocol for transferring text and graphics over the Internet; and HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which describes how that text and graphics should be displayed.

Without those technologies the Internet was a confused jumble of different files on different computers, with no common way of accessing them and no easy way of unscrambling them when you did. From Berners-Lee’s remarkable insight it was a short step to the Internet browser, invented shortly afterwards by Marc Andreessen, who went on to co-found Netscape. About the same time, the US Congress authorised the commercial use of the Internet, and the rest is history.
Berners-Lee did not profit greatly from his invention. At the time that he conceived it he was employed by CERN, the European nuclear research organisation. He is now director of the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the non-profit coordinating body for Web development. His work still involves conceptualising where the Web is headed and how to get it there.

Much of Berners-Lee’s work today is to do with what he calls the “Semantic Web”. The term has been used for a couple of years now, by Berners-Lee and others, to describe a significant extension of the power of the Web by embedding within it the power to understand the context of the information it contains.
The Semantic Web will not happen quickly or easily but Berners-Lee and others working on it are sure it is inevitable. They have set out their ideas in the April, 2002, issue of Scientific American, a special online edition about the future of the Internet. The whole issue can be downloaded from scientificamerican.com for $US5 on your credit card.

“The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning,” Berners-Lee and his co-authors explain in their article. “This better enables computers and people to work in cooperation.

“The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and understand the data they merely display at present.”
In the Semantic Web, data contained in Web pages will be coded with information that will enable computers to make sense of it. We are part of the way there, with XML (Extensible Markup Language, an extension of HTML) and emerging Web Services protocols, but the Semantic Web will enable intelligent software agents to carry out many of the searches and transactions that can now only be done by humans.

The idea of intelligent agents, or “knowbots”, has been around for some time. It makes sense to use software to navigate software. For example, you may be after a particular book at the best price. You can visit every Web bookseller you know, and do a Web search for the book, and compare all the prices. This takes time, and it would be easier if you could just tell your computer to trawl the Web for the best price.
For that to happen, the Web needs to be much more intelligent than it is now. There is no uniformity to the way data is structured on the Web, and building a knowbot to do a simple job such as finding a cheap book is impossible the way the Web currently works. The Semantic Web, says Berners-Lee, will solve that problem. In his 1999 book Weaving the Web, he explains his dream.

“Machines will become capable of analysing all the data on the Web - the content, links and transactions between people and computers. The day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines, leaving humans to provide the inspiration and intuition.”

“Our contacts include recruiters, web development companies and on-line consumer businesses, as well as advisers from corporate and government sectors. Each of these has a slightly different focus, but all understand that when carrying out a business activity the web can be seen as your customer service team, your forms, your fax machine, your client file and your help desk all rolled into one automated system. This represents a fantastic boost in efficiency.”

Students are excited because Natcoll’s new Level 6 Diploma in Web Development is targeted exclusively at getting them into work in this rapidly advancing field.
“Also, because we are using open source technologies students can experience the fun of being part of a supportive programming community willing to share its ideas and its code.”

The 35-week course is aimed at technical people, preferably with a splash of creativity. It is weighted towards programming — client side (18 per cent) and server side (27%). However design and usability are also important (7%). Students who are particularly interested in design can tune the course towards their strengths by electing to do an advanced design component (11%) instead of, or as well as, advanced server side (11%).

“There are an increasing number of middle roles combining technical and design/usability even in the corporate market. Also, employers are recognising that developers, and in particular project leaders, need to have a wider view of issues involved in web projects,” says Jones.

Other course components include multimedia web scripting using Flash (6%), Linux systems administration (7%), an industry project (18%) and the production of an online portfolio (6%) — a useful marketing tool for students after the course. During the course, students are also exposed to requirements and specification analysis, project management, extreme programming methods and creative problem solving.

Jones says that in a few years web development is unlikely to be viewed differently to desktop application programming.
“Web developers are the programmers for a distributed network-centric environment. The gap is rapidly closing between the sophistication of desktop and web applications.” Career opportunities for graduates include web master, web architect, web author, web developer, web specialist and web programmer.

According to New Media Finance, a specialist newsletter reporting on the Web sector, some design agencies command client budgets in excess of pounds 300,000 for a Web site. These top agencies might be capable of generating annual turnover of pounds 5m over the next two years.
New Media Finance also claims that the size of the Web design sector could be worth pounds 100m, assuming that there are around 100 dedicated Web design agencies.
Scott Ewings, creative director of Crown Communications, believes that any design company not including the Internet in its remit does so at its peril. According to the Design Business Association, fewer than half of its 240 members offer Web design services, so it seems that technology-based companies are picking up a considerable amount of Web design work, rather than the traditional design agencies.

Web design has been driven by technology from the start, explains Daisy Cresswell, head of new media at design and communications agency Imagination, where the multimedia department has grown rapidly from six to more than 20.

‘Traditional designers are scared of the technology,’ she suggests. ‘As a result, there’s a hell of a lot of trash out there.’ But Cresswell believes that Web site design should be the domain of the traditional designer, rather than the computer programmer. ‘As the Web develops in terms of its design, and as more well-designed sites come up, it might encourage more design agencies to think about moving into new media,’ she says.

Presentation skills

With so many companies offering a Web site design service, it can be very difficult for clients to know which company to choose. One way is to look at the design company’s own Web site. This was a tactic remembered by Eventer Design Group when it decided to create its own online presence.

‘Prior to designing our site, we had a good look at other design and multimedia companies’ sites,’ says David Ward-Streeter, Eventer’s managing director. ‘Overall, we found them uninspiring, with blocks of text, no movement or any interaction - a bit disappointing for what is supposed to be an exciting industry.’
Eventer’s Web site was designed around a ‘virtual agency tour’, which included a conference room to view the company’s work, a press cuttings folder, even a kitchen to read postcards from the staff and reviews of recommended bars and restaurants.

According to Matthew Bagwell, a new media designer at Imagination, clients need to find people who are capable of managing their brand within relevant media. ‘A lot of technology-driven companies are able to offer Web solutions, but they might not understand brand management,’ he argues.
Bagwell believes that the very best Web design can be simple, with fast delivery by using uncomplicated graphics and informative, strong text.
‘We understand what the user requires, rather than gratuitous eye candy,’ he adds.

In the future, says Bagwell, what you might see is a continuing convergence of traditional disciplines into Web media. ‘This includes online television, channel Web sites, more animation and video. In short, a more interactive environment.’

Arbiters of taste

Not surprisingly, companies from a traditional design background see themselves as the arbiters of good taste and aesthetics. They often view the Web as the province of marketing and are concerned with designing critically-acclaimed sites which are often reviewed in the Internet press.
But traditional design agencies have only recently become more aware of the Internet’s potential, suggests Richard Mellor, creative director of Hyperinteractive. ‘People from design backgrounds are learning the skills or teaming up with the right people to do very pertinent and ideas-oriented work,’ he says.
Hyperinteractive built the D&AD (Design and Art Direction) Web site.

‘Its audience is visually the most critical you can imagine, and certainly the most seasoned,’ says Mellor.
A Web site needs to have clarity, as users will be a mixture of Net novices and more experienced visitors. Ease of use, in the form of well-planned and well laid-out pages, is important.

Good navigation around the site is necessary to allow users to find what they want quickly - making it a pleasurable, rather than a frustrating experience. A well-designed site directs users to the information they need, while both branding the company and opening up the potential for new business.
Content is the key to good Web site design, with text and graphics integrated to maximise the effectiveness of the message - although Nigel Salter, director of new media at design company Stocks Austin Sice, believes that strategy is sometimes more important than visual content.

‘Some of the best-looking sites are among the most confusing and least effective,’ he argues. ‘Define who you’re trying to speak to and what you want from it.’ This might be difficult for some clients who have little idea of what they want or need from the Web. ‘Everybody feels they must have a presence, but ask them why and they say it’s because other companies do.’
Lack of strategy and a clear idea of the site’s purpose are a common failing.

Instant impact

Designers need to take on board the challenges of the Internet. Site ‘hits’ are very short, with an average visit lasting just eight seconds.
Something can be visually attractive, but the message is lost simply because it is not responding quickly enough to the user’s request.
Also, the palette of colours available on the Internet is limited compared with the print medium; downloads of graphics can be slow and visual representation is on a computer screen, not an A4 page.

Jeremy Keohane, head of new media at Bamber Forsyth, insists that many Web sites are just linear reproductions of printed articles, such as annual reports. Even a year ago, it was not unusual for companies simply to scan in their brochures and use that as their Web site. ‘Whereas corporate literature can be persuasive in nature, with the Internet you have to be more informative,’ says Keohane. Understanding the power of new media as a communications tool is the name of the game.

The traditional design sector’s new competitors in the new media arena are gathering rich pickings from the blue-chip companies that approach them to design their Web sites. AKQA has designed sites for BMW, Microsoft, and Durex. Ajaz Ahmed, director at AKQA, believes that one of the reasons for the company’s success lies in focusing on the marketing value of the Internet: ‘Relevance, reliability, performance and engagement are among the most important elements in successful Web design - and this equals brand value.’

Site costings

New Media Factory is part of a new breed of Web design firms which are merging new technology with design. According to Beverley Nolan, its marketing consultant and project manager, the company creates three basic types of Web site.
First, the basic site which acts purely as an online brochure and costs around pounds 5000. Further up the price scale, at pounds 10,000 to pounds 20,000, greater technical capabilities are added on - such as a database, which is very useful for companies needing to store large amounts of information. For the top price of pounds 40,000, New Media Factory provides a Web site that can deal with online commerce transactions.

The Web is growing at an exponential rate, perhaps reaching 200 million users by the year 2000. This means an abundance of opportunities for Web designers who are quick to realise the Internet’s potential. Some traditional designers might have been unwilling to take on the mantle of the anorak, but there are many easy-to-use software programmes which dispense with the complexities of programming. In the future, designers will be called upon to create sites which are not only visually appealing, but also information driven.

If this golden nugget doesn’t appeal to those from a traditional background, then new media companies will gladly pick up the pieces.

“Many Web sites have yet to embrace the artistic aspect of Web design, and as design on the Web becomes more sophisticated, those sites become less effective,” writes Web design guru Laura Lemay in her Sizzling Web Site Designs.

If you spend time with Web programmers and technical experts, they will tell you many sites are too big.
They deliver beautiful graphics but are slow and hard to navigate.
The useful information is buried deep below layers of menus designed to show the graphic artists’ skill rather than their understanding of the medium.
Then there are the content providers. They complain the designers and technologists have hijacked the Web. They remind us that HTML is a mark-up language designed to work with the internal structure of documents so they can be displayed meaningfully on any platform.

The Web is all about content, they argue, telling us it is there to provide information and that too often design and technology get in the way.
And those are just the people who build Web sites talking about each other’s sphere of operations. If you can get them talking about specifics, you will find their Web sites, particularly the ones they have not yet built, are the best around.

If you want an even more divergent set of ideas about what makes a good Web site, try talking to the people who plan them.
The marketing person has an opinion about what a good Web site should do that is dramatically different from that put forward by the people in the IT area.
The truth is that any Web site put together by more than one person is made up of compromises.

Some are because of the constraints within which the people who put together the Web site have to work.
The technology is limited in what it can provide.
There are many problems. Bandwidth limits the size of Web pages.

Browser compatibility (or rather browser incompatibility) limits the functionality and optimisation a developer can put into pages.
The lack of established monetary systems hampers online payments.
The list goes on and on.
Design is also limited in many ways.

Bandwidth restricts the types of images and the size of images on a Web page. As well, the design is constrained by the medium itself.
Screen resolutions and palette limitations force the designer to compromise on image quality. As well, the graphic artist is constrained by what one might call “legacy” design.

A corporate Web site needs to fit in with the image the company projects.
Unfortunately, most of the design work done on the company’s image was probably done before the Web started to become an important medium.
So, for example, few newspapers have “Web-friendly” mastheads. They are more difficult to work with online than logos designed with the Web in mind.
On the content side, the Web demands a different style from other mediums. Text needs to be shorter and punchier than the text in a brochure, but it also needs to be denser and more factual than in an ad.

The Web needs a different sort of video and audio from TV or radio.
Today, very little text is written specifically for the Web. Even less video and audio is specifically produced for presentation online.
Sometimes there are more important compromises than those forced upon the developers by the medium.
These are made during the development period as various groups within the organisation seek to influence the direction of the Web site.
Web sites are new and high profile endeavours. They are, therefore, important in the internal politics.

But even where internal politics don’t play a role, organisations have difficulty in fitting a Web site into their structures. Who has responsibility for the Web site? Should it be an IT responsibility, or is it part of marketing or is it a part of the library function?
So many different areas feed material into the Web site, and they can be affected by a Web site’s success or failure, that it is often hard for an organisation to set priorities for its site.

Even where a clear strategy is articulated at the beginning of the project, it is almost inevitable the strategy is modified as the Web site is developed.
What seemed simple at the beginning turns out to be difficult to achieve; while what looked almost impossible at the start turns out to be much easier than anticipated.
Nobody has the experience to predict everything that will happen as the Web site is developed. In this sort of environment, it is not surprising we have such different points of view about what makes a good Web site.

As you might expect, often the best Web sites are those that have the simplest and most straightforward aims.
With a simple, clear set of objectives it is much easier to work out how to make the necessary compromises.
It is easier to select the right content, develop a design and then to implement it if everybody knows what the site should do when it is finished.
Building a Web site is a complex business. We are still learning how to do that.

Alex Garden, director of web page design firm Netinsites, says web designers today need to be able to market themselves and the business and manage professional client relationships as well as program code.

“You can’t be a straight geek and become a successful web designer anymore,” says Garden.
He says beyond the ability to code in web languages such as HTML and Java and new technologies including ASP, PSP and Cold Fusion; web designers require artistic focus and plenty of marketing nous.

Stephan Spencer, managing director for web design firm NetConcepts, agrees web design graduates need to be able to liaise with clients to find out what is important to the business - design skill alone doesn’t cut it.

“What does the client most want from a web site - is it qualified leads, is it revenue, is it customer knowledge; is it profit?” says Spencer.
He says web design is not as straightforward as many people think, with key words, category listing, search engine optimisation and navigation are all essential components that need to be right.

However, he says experienced and successful designers can not only charge for the cost of designing a site, but may be able to add site support and monitoring services to their business charges.

There is a difference between web development and web design, says Rowan Schaaf, managing director for web site and kiosk developer Terabyte. Terabyte employs eight designers and three developers and Schaaf says designers glean intelligence from the customer regarding their requirements for the web site and how it will map to their company brand.

Once the planning and the design of a user interface have been completed, the information is passed to web developers - programmers skilled in web languages - for site development.

Schaaf says Terabyte recruits web designers from certain web design schools including one at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), and looks for people with creative talent as well as technical ability.
“Some things can be taught in-house, so we focus on individuals with an interest in interactive design or those who have skills in other areas such as illustration, painting, and videology,” explains Schaaf.

He says web design companies want graduates with “something quite special” and need people with a good understanding of the design fundamentals of typography and layout. These skills need to be learned irrespective of whether a person chooses new or traditional media as a career, says Schaaf.
Web design salaries start in the high $20,000s and progress up to around $75,000 for a senior web designer say Garden and Schaaf. Self employed designers with talent and business flair can earn a lot more, and creative directors can earn up to $110,000.

However, despite the financial reward and creative satisfaction of web design, Schaaf says Terabyte finds it hard to source good web design graduates. Although the specific tools required for new media design are taught in web design courses, these courses lack detail, says Schaff. He recommends keen candidates follow up standard courses with postgraduate courses in specific software applications used in the workplace.