I have a few observations to share regarding this revolution. First, a note on my travels. Forget language diversity; the Internet Age is also the age of English. If you want up-to-date worldwide information, it's in English. I've talked to folks who worry about the long-term survivability of their regional language. Engineers must speak English to read the newest manuals off the net. I suppose you could wait for a chip manual to be translated to another language, but to get the most current information, you have to go to the net, and it's more than likely you'll find the information in English.

    Users of this information are somewhat more advanced than many of the so-called information providers on the Web. It doesn't take long to detect that a company has no clue about the Web, especially when they replicate their standard marketing brochures on their site with no further information. No-content sites like these really irritate me. It would be better if these sites didn't exist rather than causing you to waste cycles hunting for information that isn't there in the first place. An example is the Carrier site, http://www.carrier.com. At first, it looks impressive, but as you dig deeper you discover it's a no-content site. It has nice fluffy pages and a listing of products, but no real information. When I go to the Carrier site, I want specifications, manuals, and everything a serious homeowner wants to know about that big box in the basement. Now. Without having to call a factory representative.

    Another pet peeve are the sites that provide huge welcoming graphics on their initial page and then have one line of text—usually a bitmap of text so it's rendered last—saying "click here to continue." Why put this waste of time and bandwidth in your way when you're trying to get to your site? (Perhaps to be able to claim that many more page hits?) Philips (http://www.philips.com) is a good example; they have a blue page containing nothing but the corporate seal, then after it's been rendered you're redirected to their real home page. Philips commits another Web sin by filling their home page with a series of bitmaps that take forever to load. Turn off the graphics to speed things up and you're left with a Picasso-esque collection of overlapping cubes and captions, only some of which are readable.

    I like my sites full of text, light on graphics. The prototypical example is Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com). You might not find everything you want on this portal, but it's the best example of a straightforward text-based lookup. Another site that uses this model is the much-maligned Drudge Report, http://www.drudgereport.com. Say what you want about his "column," Matt Drudge provides the best single site to link to dozens of political columnists and news organizations, and he does it with only a smidgen of graphics on his text-dominant page.

    Another stupid design idea is the useless applet. I don't care if it's Java or ActiveX®, an applet should do something useful, not just be entertaining. If I want to be entertained, I'll pop in my Quake CD. A prime example is on the USB organization's Web page, http://www.usb.org. You'll find a representation of a PDA-like box (which actually looks more like a gas pump) with buttons to select pages. Since the links under the buttons aren't displayed unless you hover your pointer over the buttons, it takes a while just to figure out what links are on the page.

    An example of a useful applet is the ActiveX control on the MSNBC site, http://www.msnbc.com. They have a great menu-based interface across the top-left of the page. The cascaded menus are great since you don't have to go from page to page to look at the headlines. Another neat design feature of this site is that the first few paragraphs of a story are provided initially and the remainder of the story is pulled in from a separate file. This allows you to start reading immediately, with the balance of the text available as your eyes scan down the page.

    The key to a great site is providing useful information that's found easily and delivered quickly. Surfing a well-designed site is not only productive, it's a pleasure. On a good site, graphics and applets provide information, not decoration. Web designers should be forced to use a dial-up connection on a slower box once in a while to experience how the other half lives. Oh, and test them to see if they can find something useful on their site. Now that would be entertaining.

The opinions expressed herein are those of Douglas Boling and should not be construed as the opinions of Microsoft Corporation.