The current state of World Wide Web page design reminds me of the early days of the Macintosh, when using different fonts and styles and combining graphics and text on a page was a novelty for personal computer users. Everybody just had to try out outline or shadowed type styles, or use that new typeface that looked like dripping blood. On the Web, blinking bullets, pulsating graphics, and kooky image maps are now the rage as every Web designer with enough know-how simply HAS to try out every single visual enhancement available in the latest version of HTML, and TRY THEM ALL OUT ON ONE PAGE.
Eventually, people will realize that information content is what makes a site worth visiting. Until that happy day, we suffer through pages that are so graphically clever that only their designers are in on the joke. But there's a silver lining. If you're interested in providing quality information to your customers as a means of winning business, you can learn a lot about what not to do by studying examples of excessive cool.

I'm really not out to pick on anyone in particular, but we need a real example here, so let's take www.zima.com. Navigate to this site with your Web browser and your experience will depend on which browser you use and how you have it set. If you're using a text-based browser like Lynx, you can forget zima.com. The designers of this site are so hip that text-based browser users need not apply for membership. With zima.com's graphics-or-nothing philosophy, the assumption is that nobody who uses a DOS machine or who accesses the site through the CERN server has any right to access information about the Zima beverages. I guess people like this are simply not hip enough.

And maybe the designers of zima.com can be forgiven for assuming rightly that 75% or more of Web surfers are using a graphical browser. But then, what about the more than 50% of that crowd that surf with automatic image-loading turned off? Any nitwit who uses a standard PC with a dial-up connection quickly learns to turn automatic image-loading off during Web adventures, because loading all the images adds minutes or hours to Web-surfing time. There's simply too much stuff on the Web to have to sit in front of a screen for waiting and waiting for graphical pages to load.

But tell that to the image map-happy designers at zima.com. The site's entire main directory is an image map, so those of us who don't automatically load graphics are presented with a group of empty boxes and generic "graphic goes here" icons that tell us nothing about what the site contains or how to move around it. No, folks, if you want to see what's up with Zima, you have to load the image map, which takes anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on your connection.

Still, zima.com might be forgiven if, having loaded the image map, you were presented with a useful menu of the site's contents. But NO! Rather than telling us what the site offers, we're invited to click on icons labeled with things like "The Fridge," which leads us to...another image map which itself contains more cryptic icons that don't describe what you get when you click them! Of course, you could click on "Zima Gold," but that just leads to a two-minute wait to download a print ad for this new addition to the Zima beverage lineup. Nothing like waiting a couple of minutes to see a print ad you've probably already seen in a magazine somewhere.

If the folks who designed the Zima site thought at all about the sort of people who might be interested in an online Zima presence, they must have come up with a user profile like this: 1)Likes sitting in front of PC waiting for graphics to download. 2)Hipness of language is more important than clarity. 3)Content unimportant--the clicking experience is everything. If all of Zima's adherents are Beavis and Butthead wannabes, then I guess the site is right on the mark, but my guess is they're not.

So what's the lesson here? Content is everything, and graphics aren't content. Think about your customers when designing your site. Just chain the graphic designer in a corner for awhile and think seriously about the types of things your customers are interested in, and how you can provide information like that. The people at www.goodyear.com managed to do that without sacrificing graphics totally. You get a nice, low-res blimp picture that takes a few seconds to load, and then a selection of info tailored for Goodyear customers, such as a tire selector, a schedule of auto races, and so forth. Federal Express (www.fedex.com) managed to combine the usual corporate profile with a really useful package-tracking system on their site, a feature that customers like and which also saves Fedex some of the cost of paying operators to look up that information for people who call in.

Secondly, give visitors a choice of viewing options. I don't think there's any excuse whatsoever for not offering a text-only option on every Web site.

Finally, tell your visitors what to expect when they download images. Identify images as to content and size so your visitors can make up their own minds about whether they want to wait for the download. Don't assume they think graphics are as cool as your graphic designer does.

Remember, sites like www.yahoo.com have hit rates that the folks at zima.com can only fantasize about, and graphics have nothing to do with it.