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Summary
Design |
Delays
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Futures
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Watch for new developments in Web design.This is a period of experimentation, and no one has the final answers.
I think that the whole Web environment will move in the direction of the Utilitarian school.
As the novelty of the Web wears off, users will demand usable sites and businesses will expect a payback from their Web investments.
Much of the innovation will come in areas that are not so visible -- such as structure, consistency, interfaces to databases. There will be some use of gadgets (e.g. Frames and Java) in specific applications. And there may be some technology that will spawn entirely new applications.
Search engine -- important, but difficult in our situation "Despite the primacy of search, webdesign still needs to grounded in a strong sense of structure and navigation support: all pages must make it clear where they fit in the larger scheme of the site. " Alertbox (July 15, 1997): Search and You May Find
Look for opportunities to generate automatically Web pages automatically from a database. See Philip Greenspun. Greenspun: Sites that are really databases (and other chapters in Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
Use techniques so that our pages are picked up by search engines Greenspun: Publicizing Your Site (Without Irritating Everyone on the Net)