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Designed for Failure
Kirby's Korner · September 3, 1999

Some day, every one of us is going to own a Web site.

That, at least, was the promise of the Web when it first started. Before it became overly commercialized, people talked about the Web as a way to share interests and knowledge among everyday folk, on topics ranging from hobbies to family life.

We still see much of this today, with every major Web portal from America Online to Excite rushing to let members put up their own sites. Some companies -- GeoCities, now owned by Yahoo!, to name one -- have made a business of doing nothing else.

But before we get too far down this path, we all need to think carefully about how we'll handle inevitable issues of design and communication that pop up. In many ways, the Web today is not a pretty place.

A number of events got me thinking about this subject this week. There was an argument at work over the practice of many companies, churches, and organizations buying desktop publishing software for people without any design training or awareness and expecting crisply, professionally produced results.

There was a visit to online retailer eBags, which lists product categories in blue type on a Navy background -- a scheme that looks fine on my Gateway monitor at home but was unreadable on a Macintosh monitor at work.

And a colleague forwarded to me the Web address of a page from the Canadian Canoe site. It discusses travel Web sites and human interface issues, but uses "high ASCII" characters to do so without translating the characters into standard HTML characters, making the article nearly unreadable by the end.

Everywhere you turn on the Web you can find something to dislike, whether simple design issues or decisions made about a site's approach that are simply irritating. Take the American Airlines Web site. If you're not a member of the company's AAdvantage frequent flier plan, you don't feel welcome at the site.

Or take the Web site for the giant travel agency Rosenbluth International. It has one of those opening screens that serves no purpose; a Rosenbluth logo turns into a globe, and then the site automatically transfers you to where the real information starts.

(Sometimes this type of design is used to load Java or ActiveX applets, or scripts, in the background; that doesn't appear to be the case at Rosenbluth.)

Using the press release services PR Newswire and BusinessWire can be a chore. Both continually reload an advertisement from the same handful of choices each time you move to a new page. The ads aren't cached, requiring a completely new download with each click. Worse yet, the ads have nothing to do with the topic of the page being examined, insuring that only by the luck of the draw will the ad be of any interest to the person doing the looking.

I can't begin to count the number of times I have sent e-mail to a Web site -- using the only contact method the site provides -- asking for information in preparation for an article, only to never receive a response. (Soon after its site went live, I e-mailed the Disney site. A year later, almost to the day, I received a response. I'm still waiting on others.)

Let me be fair. There are sites around I like. I use the Internet Travel Network site for bookings because it started with a clean, simple approach and has not changed. Other booking engines have improved since they started, but I haven't seen a need to change.

And as much as I preach "simpler is better," I can be swayed. One of the most technologically challenging Web sites ever devised was Microsoft's Mungo Park, which required browser plug-ins of every type imaginable to take visitors on adventure travel around the world. But the site's content was worth the effort needed to view it, something that can't be said of many high-tech efforts.

Still, Mungo Park failed. With high costs for technology and high costs for travel to exotic locales, Microsoft couldn't attract the advertising necessary to support the site. Even Microsoft, it appears, can learn a lesson or two.

David Kirby is the editor of the Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Sunday. You can reach him at dbkirby@pressroom.com.