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Some web designers understand this as part of the discipline of the craft and strive to bring beauty, elegance, and utility to their simple designs. Others rebel and might be temperamentally unsuited to this type of work. The Web needs both kinds of designers, and there is plenty of work for both.

The need for simplicity is another reason that it’s best to do as much of the design work as possible in CSS (as long as the middleware doesn’t choke on it). There is little sense in asking the server to generate deeply nested table cells when you can achieve the same result with light, clean, structural markup and a single declaration in a global style sheet. By doing the work in CSS, you save processor cycles and bandwidth; and when it comes time to update the design, you can do it yourself in the style sheet instead of pestering the programmers to change their scripts.

Naturally, you will have to test to make sure that the middleware your company has chosen can handle the CSS you’ve written. You’ll also have to test the site in multiple browsers, as described in Chapter 7, “Riding the Project Life Cycle.” During testing, you also will want to turn off CSS in your browsers to make sure that the resulting pages work in non-CSS browsers (or in CSS browsers whose users have turned off CSS in their preferences).

What do we mean by “make sure the pages work with CSS turned off?" We mean that the pages work. We don’t mean that the pages look the same with CSS and without it. Bad clients and stupid companies expect sites to look exactly the same in AOL 1.0 and Netscape 6. That’s impossible without quadrupling the budget, and it’s also pointless. Those who turn off CSS or use older browsers aren’t hoping for a rich visual experience. If you stick with basic structural markup and the simple CSS techniques described in Chapter 10, “Style Sheets for Designers,” you should be fine.

DOING MORE

Coding in PHP or ASP rarely falls within the web designer’s job description, but after working in the field for a while, many web designers are pleased to discover that they have a knack for these simple programming environments. If you are one of them, this knack will not go unappreciated or make you any less marketable.

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Mini-Case Study: Waferbaby.com

Waferbaby (http://www.waferbaby.com/), Daniel Bogan’s delightful, personal site, makes smart use of PHP to facilitate dynamic content such as the site’s “Brainstorm” section and to enable playfully user-centric design, as seen in the site’s “Preferences” department (see Figure 12.3).

Figure 12.3

User-selectable “Preferences” at Daniel Bogan’s Waferbaby. Choose a look, and the site changes. Though this might appear to be the brainchild of a pro-

grammer, Bogan is actually an animator-illustrator.

If he can do it, you can do it (http:// www.waferbaby.com/).

In “Brainstorm,” readers respond to a provocative question on the site by typing their answers in a form. Instantly, these answers appear on the page, in reverse chronological order. Readers vie to outdo the wit and originality of previous answers. The audience creates the content; personal involvement and natural curiosity promote repeat visits.

In “Preferences,” visitors can modify Waferbaby’s appearance by choosing alternate color schemes and typographic choices modeled after wellknown personal sites or create their own look and feel by editing a CSS document right in the browser. When the reader is happy with the color scheme and typography, it is stored as a JavaScript cookie on her hard drive. The site will use her chosen color scheme and fonts until she decides to change it.

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Both “Brainstorm” and “Preferences” are made possible by a few lines of code in PHP, a JavaScript cookie, and a MySQL database to store and fetch the results.

Mini-Case Study: Metafilter.com

In 1999, Matt Haughey used Allaire Cold Fusion to create Metafilter (http:// www.metafilter.com/), a community site for web authors who like to write about other people’s web content. This site will be discussed again in Chapter 13. For the time being, it is worth noting how Metafilter accommodates two levels of dynamic change: instantaneous change based on user actions and evolutionary change based on user patterns observed over time (see Figure 12.4).

Figure 12.4

Matt Haughey’s Metafilter community site, a webbased application that responds to its members’ needs. The dark blue panel at right, introduced in January 2001, keeps members posted on changes in the way the site functions (http://www.metafilter.com/).

As in Waferbaby’s “Brainstorm,” at Metafilter, user participation fashions the content, generating loyalty and repeat usage. As usage patterns emerge, Haughey responds to them by adjusting the way the site works. A new feature is added, an old one removed. This in turn changes the way the site is perceived and used. New usage patterns emerge, and over time, new site-wide changes are instituted.

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Every site owner studies usage patterns and changes the site accordingly: rotating content more frequently in the most visited sections; clarifying a text label if one section of the site continually goes ignored; changing the design to emphasize the least-visited section (or the most-visited); or removing front page links to sections the public simply seems not to care about (but keeping those sections alive to avoid link rot). The possibilities are many.

Add dynamic, user-generated content to the mix, and the potential grows even more interesting. On top of everything else, a psychological dynamic begins to emerge. Is the community shaping the site, or is the site shaping the community?

We don’t wish to imply that this whole thing goes on like a scientific experiment or that the community in question serves as some kind of Petri dish slide. As in any good community site, the owner/moderator is as involved as any other member—but with the added ability to institute changes or solicit suggested changes from the members. What is interesting is the way that human dynamic behavior shapes and is shaped by basic web dynamism. This is the power of a site that changes when you type on it.

This is interactivity print cannot match.

Any Size Kid Can Play

We’ve confined our case studies to two relatively small-scale (but influential) projects to show that dynamic interactivity is within the reach of even the modest web shop or the lone freelancer. Large-scale projects require teams of information architects, project managers, web designers, developers, writers, web technicians, producers, network administrators, server consultants, marketers, advertising teams, editors, and content specialists. If you go into full-time web design, you will likely be part of such enterprises. But even sites created by tiny teams can use the techniques just discussed to add web dynamism to the mix.

For instance, a dyed-in-the-wool print designer wishes to service a few of his clients who’ve requested smallish websites: 10 to 20 pages of mostly static content. One of these clients urgently desires the ability to post cus-