A New Template

A new Template is coming. This isn't probably news to anyone. It was probably a smart bet that work began on the next one as soon as the last one was officially published. And while there may have been a self-congratulatory weekend taken off, that's pretty much how I remember things.

People expect change, on the Web. It's built into the promise of linking documents from all around the world. And that change extends not only to content, but also to the design of the content, the presentation of the content and even how we work and interact with the content.

Even if Web technology was fully mature and never changed again, there are still many good reasons to change things every now and then. Retailers routinely move the coffee and cereal aisles in grocery stores, or the power tools and the nuts and bolts in hardware stores. People have this amazing capacity to discount things that don't change.

Apparently it's buried deep within our Lizard Brains and has been there for centuries. Remember the scene in Jurassic Park when everyone stood still so the Velociraptor wouldn't see them? 'Raptors visual processing greatly discounted anything that wasn't moving, that wasn't new, in a way of thinking. If an animal moved, its relative position changed, something was new, and so those signals went straight to the brain. But rocks and trees were more or less motionless and could easily be discounted in a day spent almost entirely looking for food.

Similarly, it's been said that most people cannot draw an accurate representation of either their wristwatch or their car dash board. Isn't that interesting? They see these displays sometimes dozens of times per day, so often that what starts to register is the un-changing-ness of most of it. Sure, the hour and minute hands move from glance to glance, and you note the passing of time that way, but are your numbers Arabic, Roman, or just dots in the position of 3, 6, 9 and 12? Are you sure? We notice our speed changing as we get out on the highway, but how high does your speedometer read? 85 miles per hour? 100 miles per hour? More? What about your gas gauge? Does just sweep from "E" to "F" or does it have factions of a tank marked off, somehow? See what we mean? We're lucky we recognize members of our own families, I guess.

So after a time, it's common to change things. And change provides a great chance to introduce new technologies and/or new ideas into the mix. When our first Web page showed up, there wasn't much need of JavaScript. Then there was, and then there wasn't, again. Now it's back again with a lot of light shining on AJAX. This is one of those things that we can plug into the page now and get real benefit from. We used to spend a lot of calories wrestling with differences between different Web browsers. We have to do much less of that kind of thing, now.

Kids coming in today have grown up in a world that has always had an Internet. Web pages have always added new features and new technologies have come along at irregular intervals that needed to be reckoned with. The Web page we show him should be at least as cool as the one his high school had, shouldn't it? He just spent a bag of money on a new laptop and a new smart cell phone. Our pages should work on those, too, right? Wouldn't you be expecting that much?

So we are coming down to the wire on a new Template design. As before, several groups have been working on several designs. Within each, the battle for supremacy has been raging since last fall (not to sound too WWE or anything). Should the new navigation menu be over here? Or over there? Are people still using QuickLinks, or should we move everyone into the Search box? And what about that Search box? Do we really need to explain that we want to search for people or pages? If we took that question away we could present both and maybe speed things up for people. Hmm….

We expect to have three good candidates, soon. You'll be able to see them and comment about them, and then there'll be… one. And then we'll deploy the new design, suffer the abuse from detractors and bask in the glow of the praisers and… start the whole process over, again. You've been warned.