Part 1: Blogs, advertisers, good vs. bad websites

Howdy, Jeffrey. Tell us about your varied artistic endeavors in your early career and how they have influenced your web designs and writings.
I was a novelist who couldn't sell his novels; a composer who barely made a living; a synthesizer player in a post-punk techno-surf band with a small but ardent following and a manager who was a member of the Communist party. I ended up in advertising, where I was able to earn a living while focusing my creativity and learning about communication, brand identity, and the gentle art of talking to clients.

Congratulations on your two weblog awards. Why do you think Blogs are so popular? Why are people interested in reading about other ordinary people?
With few exceptions, awards are meaningless. I learned that in advertising, where there are a few genuine awards that everyone wishes they could earn (Communication Arts, One Club), but where anyone can win plenty of other awards. You get a regional Addy for "best use of spot color varnish in a non-standard billboard on Rural Route 7," and you state on your resume that you won an Addy. Like I said, there are some truly meaningful awards. I didn't win many. Nobody does. I won the other stuff.

The Bloggies are nice, though, because it's an award from one's peers. That has meaning to me.

I'm not sure why anyone is interested in other people's lives, other than the fact that as human beings we are always interested in what our neighbors are doing.

I think we all grew up wanting to be rock stars and movie stars and the Web provides the illusion that we are living this fantasy.

I don't write about my life very much and I don't think I would have won an award if I did. Mainly I write about web design. Of course, to me, web design is incredibly personal. I confine my confessional writing to a section of my site called "My Glamorous Life." It's an ironic title but some people may miss that.

You spoke on the topic of "What Do Today's Web Designers Need To Know" at Web Design 2001 in Atlanta. What do web designers need to know?
Two things, really. The first is that web design is communication. Good websites are conversations.

The second thing all web designers should know is that the way we build sites must change and will. The way we've been building them - to the quirks of individual browsers instead of to a common set of standards - is wrong for a lot of reasons.

Suffice to say, the Web is broken, and all of us helped to break it. All of us can fix that by learning about and using W3C recommendations, but at a cost of decreased attractiveness and limited functionality in browsers, which don't support these recommendations. For more about that, read To Hell with Bad Browsers at A List Apart. Pardon the plug.

What do you think Web consultants should do now that companies can't pay big bucks for fancy schmancy Web sites?
What they should always have done: help their clients analyze what they have to offer, decide what is most valuable about it, and create accessible, attractive sites that communicate real things to real people.

In tandem with that, stop importing bogus business values to a medium and an industry that were never about those values. As a client, I don't care about your suit, I don't care about your 24-foot ceilings and reconditioned loft space and networked video games. I care about the work.

Do you understand my business? Can you communicate it in a Web-specific way? Can you entertain, teach and extend my reach and my brand? Can you do all that without expecting a Hollywood budget? Then I want you to work for me. If you can afford the 24-foot ceilings, good for you; if not, I don't care.

You've been quite the fighter for Web standards through Web Standards Project (WaSP) that you currently lead. Your recent victory is Netscape's 6 compliance. What do you think of W3C's draft of the CSS-3 specs?
I'm having them translated into English now, and will let you know when that's done. I think CSS-3 is about increased power and flexibility - for instance, making it trivial to do with Style Sheets what we now do easily with HTML table-based layouts, but have a tough time pulling off in CSS.

But I'm in the trenches with all Web designers; what I really need now is solid support for CSS-1. With a few exceptions, I have that in the latest versions of IE, Navigator, and Opera. But previous versions of some of these browsers are so badly broken that implementing even the most basic parts of CSS-1 can cause some of these browsers to crash.

This has lead many developers to shelve CSS and continue building broken sites with non-standard, non-validating HTML extensions and workarounds in the name of backward compatibility. The absurdity is that browser makers have finally given us what we asked for three years ago, and now many of us are afraid to use it. It's a cycle that can only be broken by taking bold steps.

WaSP recently urged developers to upgrade all browsers in conjunction with following W3C specs. Two questions: (1) Why do you encourage the software upgrade instead of just following standards? (2) What other website (s) do you recommend for web standard documentation since W3C makes it a challenging read?
WaSP actually asked developers to learn about and use W3C recommendations, even if the resulting sites work less than optimally in broken, non-compliant browsers, and to inform their audience that better browsers are readily available and may be downloaded for free. How developers choose to implement these suggestions - if they choose to implement them at all - depends on the nature of each site and its audience. We expect that developers will analyze their audience and develop their own strategies and language.

Why do we encourage users (not developers) to upgrade their browsers? For the same reason Firestone encourages drivers to trade in unsafe tires. Previous browsers were not built to support CSS-1, HTML4/XHTML, ECMAScript, XML, and the DOM; the big two browsers, in particular, were built to compete with each other by any means necessary. Their focus was on proprietary technologies, and the market didn't tell them that standards were important. So support for standards in these browsers was often partial, often spotty, sometimes worse than no support at all. (It's better not to support CSS-1 than to support it so badly that websites crash.)

As a result of the way these old browsers were built, when developers follow W3C recommendations, the resulting sites can fail in these browsers. For instance, in 1999 I redesigned my (1995) online tutorial for web designers, replacing HTML table-based layouts with very basic, valid CSS-1. Netscape 4 users could not access this material without crashing. I used JavaScript to paste a warning message at the top of the page and stopped redesigning the site. My hands were tied.

Two years later, millions of Netscape 4 users still crash from basic, valid CSS-1. But Netscape has released a far more standards-compliant browser. As has Microsoft. As has Opera. There are other good ones as well. Continuing to rely on broken browsers is not a healthy long-term strategy for Web users. Ultimately all Web developers will build standards-compliant sites, and these users will be hurt. We're encouraging them to upgrade now, while most sites are still code tumors, so they can avoid being hurt.

Where can developers learn about W3C recommendations without getting a PhD? Web Review has numerous articles working designers and developers can follow. A List Apart has a DOM series, a CSS series, and other articles anyone in the field can understand and use. We even try to make it entertaining, since learning new things can be daunting. There's good stuff at Web Reference, Webmonkey and Builder. Peter-Paul Koch runs a good DOM mailing list. Apple has good stuff.

What do you think advertisers should be doing to get our attention in an already overcrowded and overzealous Web world?
Sponsoring instead of running banners. Sponsoring design sites, community sites, forums and independent sites. I saw two of the Cluetrain guys discuss this idea at Geek Pride 2000.

(Editor's note: See our interview with David Weinberger of Cluetrain.)

Get rid of the rhetoric, which businesses often find disturbing, and you're left with a core idea that any smart marketer will probably respond to: people use the Web to have conversations with each other. An advertiser who facilitates those conversations will be much better-received than one who interrupts the conversations.

Advertisers can facilitate conversations by providing bandwidth: this forum about child safety is brought to you by Toys-R-Us. That's it; no sales message, no banners, no tie-ins ("Thanks for discussing your child's well-being! Save 5% when you order now!"). None of that junk that sophisticated consumers reject in old media and resent in new media. If I've learned something valuable about my child's well-being, I'll feel kindly disposed toward Toys-R-Us for sponsoring the message board.

Similarly, this design site brought to you by Macromedia (no ad message), this XML discussion site brought to you by O'Reilly Publishing (no ad message).

Can it work? Apple and Macromedia have both done something like that with the design site K10k. It remains to be seen if other advertisers will have the guts to try this on more conventional sites. They may as well: what they're doing now isn't working. And what they tried a couple of years ago, big bandwidth interstitials, didn't seem to work very well either.

You admitted in a past interview you don't know what "great Web design means." Then, what do you think are the most important things in a good website (other than Web Standards compliance)?
Sometimes great graphic design isn't great Web design: for instance when it is inappropriate to the audience, message, or technology best suited to the audience's needs. Sometimes what looks best is best. It's great when that happens. Sometimes the best design is one that is simple, elegant, understated, low-bandwidth, and degrades well. But this kind of design never wins awards, and designers have to be willing to live with that if they wish to do the right thing on a site like that.

To me, overall, a great website is one where I feel I am communing with a mind - as I feel when I listen to music, read a novel, watch a movie. Music and movies are collaborative, as are most websites, but one still feels a one-to-one communication with a creative mind, a dialogue between viewer and author, and websites that can achieve the same thing have a greatness to them. It is easier to achieve this on personal sites than on commercial sites, especially commercial sites that have to perform 1,000 functions for 100 different types of user.

On a site that must be many things for many kinds of people, design greatness lies in the architecture. I don't care what my neighbor hopes to achieve on the site; can I achieve what I want to? Can I do it without thinking too hard? Do I have to search? Will my first search fail? Will I be asked to learn what "Boolean" means because the site architects didn't foresee my needs?

Complex sites should only rarely rely on back-up functionality like Search forms. No matter how many users they are intended to satisfy, they should always feel like they were designed to allow me to do what I need to. This is a very tough thing to pull off, but it often makes the difference between success and failure. Then again, I still can't figure out Ebay and my girlfriend, who doesn't understand the Macintosh file management system, can buzz through Ebay like Sherman through Georgia. I don't think Ebay is intuitively structured or well-designed on any level, but it's one of the most successful sites ever dropped onto the Web, so why are you even talking to me?

And a bad website?
A bad site is hard to use. A bad site is easy to use but does not communicate. A bad site is easy to use and communicates, but it does not communicate the right message to its intended audience. A bad site is easy to use and communicates the right message, but the site serves no actual human need and should not have been created at all.

A bad site commands, a good site invites. A bad site throws up barriers, a good site opens like the petals of a flower. A bad site displeases no one and therefore greatly pleases no one. A good site, like a good book, like good music, greatly pleases some while turning off others.

A bad site tells me what I already know and does not tell me what I came to find out. A bad site repurposes non-Web content; a good site offers design and content created for an online audience. A bad site shovels text down a loveless hole of ugliness; a good site attempts to make text easy to read and attractive. A bad site does not guide or guides but provides no options. A good site guides and offers alternatives. A bad site works only one way when it works at all. A good site works exactly as its designers intended, yet I feel it works the way I want it to.

Continued...