The Years Ahead…

I cannot tell you for sure how the economy will do in the weeks and months ahead of us. I have no idea who might prevail in Afghanistan or Iraq or even Canada. We may lose an automaker and we may lose a few newspapers before all of this gets behind us, but this much I know:

The Twenty-First Century Will Happen Online.

If you and your people are not already starting to think about the Web as your primary media for reaching your customers and your potential customers, you had better start soon.

I love driving with my wife. We have the best conversations. And I can still remember that time, not too long ago, when we would start talking about some new technology, some old product or company or some historical event and one of us would say, "I wonder if there is a Web site about that?" or "I wonder if there is anything online, about that?" After two or three years, we finally stopped being surprised when we got back home and discovered that very often was plenty online about "that".

Today, we are surprised when we cannot find anything about something, online.

When I sold radio commercials, it was a time between technologies. More and more people were spending their time with electronic media like TV and radio than with print media like newspapers and billboards. But people easily believe that "everyone" acts the way they do. I visited business after business who was satisfied with their current ad budget and placement because "everyone reads the newspaper". I would point out that great masses of people did not subscribe to the paper and did not even buy so much as a single copy in a week, comparing the population of the town with the published sales figures for the paper, but a lot of folks stayed with the paper because it was substantial.

I was selling air and echoes, to them. A newspaper could be read, set aside and read again. A newspaper could be passed around. My commercials might play while someone was walking from the house to the car, on their way to a competitor, and if it did its value evaporated instantly, in their eyes.

I visited that town for the first time in twenty years and was surprised that all—all—of those old-line businesses are gone, now. I'm sure it's just coincidence in many cases. But I'm also sure it was a factor in some of them, too.

With a few of my clients, I was able to talk them out of four-color ads in the Sunday paper, going for two or three colors and giving me the money they would have spent for another color, to run ads all week long, not just on Sunday. Three out of five of those businesses were still in business, twenty-one years later. I'm sure that is coincidence, too but again, I'm also sure it was a factor.

An awful lot of decisions get made, or more properly don't get made, because "We've always done it like this". In an economy like ours today, it may be well to look over everything and ask yourself if you're maybe backing a very tired old horse? Newsletters, flyers, pamphlets and brochures and now even radio and TV press releases have all had their day in the sun, but increasingly it's the aptly-named World-Wide Web that is holding sway.

The kids coming up today with their netbooks and smart phones have an expectation of finding what they want and need, online. They will never, ever, be newspaper readers.

The Twenty-First Century Will Happen Online. Make sure you're a part of it.

The Web Designer Muscle

I don't consider myself much of a Web designer. Maybe I am, and I just don't know. I don't get many opportunities to work out that particular muscle of my brain very often. There are people who do this kind of thing all day, every day, designing dozens and dozens of pages and sites over the course of a year. I am not one of them. So maybe in the sense that Napoleon Bonaparte may have been a great racing driver I might be a passable Web designer, but I don't do enough to feel comfortable or confident, most of the time.

My world is one of Dreamweaver Templates. We come up with a new design every few years, hammering on the sharp edges of various new technologies and… then that's pretty much it. File ⇒ New gets you, instantly, a fresh, clean copy of the design's blank page, with all of the baked-in goodness, well, baked-in.

The great wheel turns and three summers have come and gone and it is once again time to do it all over. I am really enjoying this redesign process and once again wishing I did a little more of this kind of thing. Not that I am ready to bag it all and work full-time at a Web agency or anything like that. There is a lot of comfort in a good Template. I can whip a typical student worker or staff secretary into a Web frenzy in about an hour and a half and create another soldier in the Standards Compliance Army who can then create a wonderful new page in only about ten minutes. I enjoy that.

But it's nice to wonder, "What if we moved this little bit over here?" now and then. I have to justify my existence to my Director every year—why shouldn't the Search Window or QuickLinks bar have to, right? Inertia is a strange and wonderful thing but I wonder if it isn't responsible for more bad in the world than good. "Because we have always done it this way" is the bane of many a modern business process, not just in Web design, I'm sure.

The last several weeks I have spent quite a few hours in this design process. This is many more than I do outside of the six months or so every three years when we are actually building a new template. It is fascinating to see the process at work. Mark Twain once said that there are two things you never want to see being made, "Law, and sausages". I suspect he may have said as much about Web design, but I find it compelling. Here's a guy (or just as often, a gal) with a favorite aspect of their candidate for Next Design, advocating for their way of doing things over someone else's ideas.

Some of these are great ideas, really. Some of them are, well, kind of average. Some are things we could and maybe should do immediately and quite often someone will come up with an idea that works wonderfully on every computer on the planet, but not on, say, the new smart cell phones. Remember, we are building a page today for the Web world of next year, the year beyond and the year beyond that, as well. It's likely that some huge percentage of our usage will be coming from these little appliances in the years ahead. They are a not-inconsequential portion of the market today, but they may be the majority by 2011.

We get a bunch of this kind of thing. Here's a wonderful navigation scheme, but it is almost unworkable without JavaScript, or Flash? That's useless, to us. A great new way to do this or that, but something that doesn't function in screen-readers? Again, great for someone else, but not us. It is challenging, building a page that is easy to learn and easy to use. It's a challenge building a page that can hold a simple photo and brief message as well as multiple columns of text with illustrations.

I'm glad to be a part of it. I wish I did a little more of it. But make no mistake, I am glad that it only rolls around once every few years, too.

The Future is Coming

I have been telling people in my HTML classes for years that one of the cool things about HTML was that it was about the only thing in computerdom that you could learn all of. The reason was that HTML v4.01 was supposed to be the last, final, ultimate edition of the storied language that build the Web. You don't probably use the same word processor, spreadsheet or operating system you used ten years ago, but we are enjoying the same version of HTML and there are no plans for another.

And then someone started making plans.

It never was as true as I was making out, I'll own that. But I was trying to build hope and confidence amongst the beginners. There would be plenty of time to learn about XHTML's development path, later, I figured. Technically, what I was telling them was true: There would be no further developments to HTML. You could start today, learning only one thing a day, and after a year or so you would know as much as anybody could about HTML. The guys who wrote your word processor? They still have jobs and they're hard at work at the next version, but the HTML shop has closed down and everyone has gone home. I used to imagine tumbleweeds blowing through the scene, myself.

Well, about a year and a half ago, word started seeping out that the XHTML2 crew was a dysfunctional family. Lots of arguing, and over some pretty petty differences, really. And it seemed, from what we'd heard of what they were doing, that some of them had kind of lost their way. The whole reason for XHTML was forcing a stricter adherence to standards, with a simpler rule set. A lot of that kind of spirit wasn't making the jump to XHTML2.

About the same time, wouldn't you know, a group got together to discuss HTML5. "No problem", I thought to myself. "The way these things go, this could end up being tied-up for years and years." It turns out I'm not very good at this prognostication business—you should see my stock portfolio—and we could very well have an HTML5 before we have an XHTML2.

So, you're building a Web page template today that will go into widespread use in three months, and remain in active service for at least three years, probably. Three long years. What do you markup your template with? The old workhorse, HTML? You could shine it up a little by adhering to the HTML v4.01 Strict conventions. Or do you go with XHTML because it's been what you've used for the last few years and we just now got everyone used to self-closing tags like <hr />? Or do you peek inside HTML5 and take advantage of the surprising number of elements that modern browsers already know and understand?

Nearly every Web page ever built has had a header area, or a footer, or a navigation block. The last few years, we have designed these with <div> tags, artificial block-level land-grabs that map out an area for a specific use or treatment. But if every page has a structure including headers and footers and navigation, why isn't there a structural element of HTML that does that for us? There is, in HTML5.

Just what we needed this summer, huh? More interesting days.