Micromedia

There are a thousand and one details to every major web site. And most of these details can again be broken down into six million colors or a hundred lines of script or some other megalopolis of binary data. It's enough to make your head spin if you look too closely. Fortunately, we can keep our distance by building on the wealth of experience that has crammed these details by the millions into the hardware and software that we use, and by building on our own experience of details that work. This grasp of micromedia resources is crucial to the development of any macromedium like a web site. Here are some of the details to consider.

Text

Word Processors

Text is

Lists

Tooltips and Popups

Data

Tables

Queries

Forms

Reports

Scripts

Menus

Once-upon-a-time you could stand in one place and simply turn your head to survey a store or workshop and find the thing you were looking for. Now we stare at a couple square feet of monitor expecting to find, quickly, items that are all but buried in a world-wide-web of stores and workshops. The computer age has had no trouble generating information -- the difficulty lies in finding it back.

Side Bars

Toolbars

Drop-down menus

Folder Trees

Graphics

Graphics aren't everything, but you can't avoid them either. Even the pages of a simple, text-only book have a design and a flow that affect the reader visually. But no matter how important graphics are, content will always be more. In fact, self-consciously graphic web pages with little text worth reading have less impact than a page full of well chosen words.

So the trick is (as it has always been) to let graphic design flow out of the content, to let form follow function. If you want to improve your image then by all means join those that are flocking to the web and give it a shot. But if you want to be more than a flash in the pan, say something worth hearing and give the browser something worth keeping and coming back to. 

Style

Logos

Buttons

Symbols