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How Good Does A Web Page Have To Be?

Basic On "Communication"

How good does a web page have to be?

That is similar to the question, "How good does art have to be?"

There is an exact answer to both of these questions, and many other similar questions related to "how good" does something have to be.

Mr. Hubbard asks this question, and answers it, this way:

How good does a professional work of art have to be?  This would include painting, music, photography, poetry, any of the arts whether fine or otherwise.  It would also include presenting oneself as an art form as well as one's products.

Yes how GOOD does such a work of art have to be?

Ah, you say, but that is an imponderable, a thing that can't be answered. Verily, you say, you have just asked a question for which there are no answers except the sneers and applause of critics.  Indeed, this is why we have art-critics!  For who can tell you how good good is. Who knows?

I have a surprise for you. There IS an answer.

. . . .

So what is it?

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE ITSELF ADEQUATE TO PRODUCE AN EMOTIONAL IMPACT.

And that is how good a work of art has to be to be good.

If you look this over from various sides, you will see that the general spectator is generally unaware of technique. That is the zone of art's creators.

Were you to watch a crowd watching a magician, you would find one common denominator eliciting uniform response.  If he is a good magician he is a smooth showman. He isn't showing them how he does his tricks. He is showing them a flawless flowing performance. This alone is providing the carrier wave that takes the substance of his actions to his audience. Through a far cry from fine art, perhaps, yet there is art in the way he does things. If he is good, the audience is seeing first of all, before anything else, the TECHNICAL EXPERTISE of his performance. They are also watching him do things they know they can't do. And they are watching the outcome of his presentations. He is a good magician if he gives a technically flawless performance just in terms of scenes and motions which provided the channel for what he is presenting.

Not to compare Bach with a magician (though you could), all great pieces of art have this one factor in common. First of all, before one looks at the faces on the canvas or hears the meaning of the song, there is the TECHNICAL EXPERTISE there adequate to produce an emotional impact. Before one adds message or meaning, there is this TECHNICAL EXPERTISE.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE is composed of all the little and large bits of technique known to the skilled painter, musician, actor, any artist. He adds these things together in his basic presentation.  He knows what he is doing. And how to do it.  And then to this he adds his message.

All old masters were in there nailing canvas on frames as apprentices or grinding up the lapis lazuli or cleaning paintbrushes before they arrived at the Metropolitan.

But, how many paintbrushes do you have to clean? Enough to know that clean paintbrushes make clean color. How many clarinet reeds do you have to replace? Enough to know which types will hit high C.

Back of every artist there is technique.  You see them groping, finding, discarding, fooling about. What are they hunting for? A new blue? No, just a constant of blue that is an adequate quality.

And you see somebody who can really paint still stumbling about looking for technique -- a total overrun.

Someplace one says, "That's the TECHNICAL EXPERTISE adequate to produce an emotional impact." And that's it. Now he CAN.  So he devotes himself to messages.

If you get this tangled up or backwards, the art does not have a good chance of being good. If one bats out messages without a TECHNICALLY EXPERT carrier wave of art, the first standard of the many spectators seems to be violated.

The nice trick is to be a technician and retain one's fire. Then one can whip out the masterpieces like chain lightening. And all the great artists seem to have managed that.  And when they forked off onto a new trail they mastered the technique and then erupted with great works.

It is a remarkable thing about expertise. Do you  know that some artists get by on "technical expertise adequate to produce an emotional impact" alone with no messages? They night not suspect that. But it is true.

So, the "expertise adequate" is important enough to be itself art. It is never great art. But it produces an emotional impact just from quality alone.

And how masterly an expertise?  Not very masterly.  Merely adequate.  How adequate is adequate? Well, people have been known to criticize a story because there were typographical errors in the typing.   And stories by the nonadept often go pages before anyone appears or anything happens. And scores have been known to be considered dull simply because they were inexpertly chorded or clashed. And a handsome actor has been known not to have made it because he never knew what to do with his arms, for all his fiery thundering of the Bard's words.

Any art demands a certain expertise. When this is basically sound, magic!  Almost anyone will look at it and say Ah!  For quality alone has an emotional impact.   That it is cubist or dissonant or blank verse has very little bearing on it; the type of art form is no limitation in audience attention generally when it has, underlying it and expressed in it, the expertise adequate to produce an emotional impact.

The message is what the audience thinks it sees or hears. The significance of the play, the towering clouds of sound in the symphony, the scatter--batter of the current pop group, are what the audience thinks it is perceiving and what they will describe, usually, or which they think they admire. If it comes to them with a basic expertise itself able to produce an emotional impact they will think it is great. And it will be great.

(Source:  HCOB 29 July 1973, Art, More About, page 500, Tech Vol. X)

What is the difference between a "web page" and a piece of art?  Not much!

A web page IS a piece of art and it DOES carry a message.  Many web designers miss this point and think that "content is king." They work hard to get an impressive message without realizing that they are preventing the audience from getting the message because the technical presentation is inadequate.

What makes a web page technically INADEQUATE?

Very poor technique in web design is SO terribly prevalent on the Internet that "adequate expertise" can be easily described simply as things to avoid -- features that are all to common on the net.

useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website

Jakob Nielsen, perhaps, is the Guru of Web Page Usability.  With no complexity at all he would take "ordinary college" students, those already reasonably proficient with a computer, and give them, say, five different web sites to visit, each visit to measure the time from entering the site until an objective (such as buying something in the shopping cart) could be achieved.  It has not been unusual for him to find a very large percentage of these tasks could not be completed at all, or took far, far more time than some usual browser might be willing to spend.  He has gathered an amazing resource for web designers, usually his own, but included others.  Here is a resource on "Writing For The Web."

It would be well worth the time to browse many back issues of Jakob's newsletters to find tidbits like this one:

Summary:
Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation.

PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online.

For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go.   (source)

Here is another tidbit from Jakob:

How Users Read on the Web

They don't.

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In a recent study John Morkes and I found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.

As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using

Jakob recommends, as a factor of good page design, that EVERY page contain some familiar link, or image, to return the browser to the home page.  All too often the browser finds himself on a page that has no such link, and simply abandons that whole web site.

I recall with awe the lesson I learned when I was studying to be a professional public speaker -- and when I gave "demonstration speeches" in front of an audience of professional speakers.

I gave a 5 minute demo speech one day.  I call it my "Rumble of Death" speech.  You'd have to hear it to get the full impact of this point.  Let me conclude for you that the speech, itself, has NO meaning. It is a series of words, delivered with fine gestures, pauses, words that had, themselves, meanings, but no sentences that made any sense at all.  Here was technique with zero message.

I recall asking one from my audience, many months later, what he though of that speech. He told me it was a "great speech."  I asked him, "what did I say?"

He immediately admitted he had no idea of what I said. But, my technical expertise was adequate to convince him that I was a great public speaker, even though my actual speech was meaningless.

Later I found academic basis for this phenomenon.  There are well accepted "rules" for public speaking that say:

This lesson is hard to instill in a student public speaker.  He refuses to memorize his speech, so reads it and loses his audience in the first 10 seconds.

He wears white socks with a formal suit.  All the audience ever experiences is the odd dress.

He stands close to you, talks, but smells?  Well, you will remember the smell, but not the meaning of his words.

There are countless examples.

Images may well be coming along as having a technical expertise of their own on the web.  The original material, above, by Mr. Hubbard, was initially aimed at "art" and certainly "art" is and should be on the web.  Clip art is the standard fare just now, but won't last long as newer and better forms become standard.  In this light Disney, finally, is cutting back on the manual animation projects and turning to computer generated animation.

The main challenge [facing Disney] is retraining a crew of artists wedded to a different medium. Unlike traditional animation, which involves thousands of hand-drawn pictures, computer-generated characters are built as computer models, placed in three-dimensional virtual sets and lit much like actors in a live-action movie.  (Source)

Web pages are not at all different from paintings, or speeches -- there are rules relating to the technical rendition.  These rules are probably changing much more rapidly than any such rules in the past.  So, we need to keep up with the technically expert approach, while retaining the fire in the content.

 

Official

Karl Loren