Pick up your agency or company brochure and look at it carefully. If it's a full-color brochure with a number of photographs, interesting graphics, and lots of text, so much the better. And if it's an unusual size and format, has some interesting folds and includes some other special treatment such as different weight papers, embossing, or die-cutting, then you probably have something quite special, a show piece of sorts that reflects significant marketing communication and print media design effort.
Now, try to imagine your brochure as a Web site. A number of issues now arise. Quite possibly the cover or first page of your brochure has a large, catchy headline, a fancy graphic, or nice photo. If your logo is even displayed on the first page, it probably doesn't dominate. So then, how do you translate the first page of your brochure into a home page? Next, consider all that text on the inside pages of your brochure. How do you translate them to your Web site? As you think about your brochure and imagine it as a Web site, you soon realize that many of the elements and their treatments in paper brochures don't work very well on the Internet.
More importantly, however, is that when your paper brochure is given away and read, it is pretty much a once-and-done event. You've transmitted your message, and unless the recipient somehow interacts with your brochure, responds, or gives you some kind of feedback, the brochure's life is spent. The same thing can happen with an online electronic brochure that masquerades as a Web site.
From your own Internet browsing experience you know that what you see on your computer screen inherently is - and must be - a different kind of presentation than what you're used to in paper-based media. It's not that one medium is better or worse than the other - they're just different. Paper-based media is static, while Web-based media should be dynamic and organic. Other significant differences exist as well. Recognizing those differences is an important first step in creating an effective Web site. This article focuses on some of the fundamental differences between print and Web media and user perceptions and expectations regarding them.
Communication and context
By definition, communication cannot take place in a vacuum. All communication requires a message, someone to send the message, and someone to receive the message. Effective communication, the kind that elicits response, also includes feedback from the receiver to the sender.
Communication also takes place within a context, a backdrop against which the communication is understood and sometimes even expected. Communication is often adapted or modified to fit the context or situation. For example, your communication style and manner at a church service is quite different from your speech and behavior at a football game. In short, you adapt your communication to the context.
The likelihood that successful communication will take place often depends on how well the communication is adapted to the context. For example, using a PowerPoint presentation (the communication) to project sales charts and graphs onto a screen will be ineffective if the room is too bright (context). If the room can't be adequately darkened (context), a different method of communication (e.g., display boards) should be adopted. In a similar manner, the nine-point Times Roman typeface used in your paper brochure (communication) will be hard to read on your Web site (context). And further, an order form that is plainly visible on the bottom of a letter-size flyer (communication) may be difficult to locate in a Web site that is flawed with poorly designed site navigation (context).
Thus, when making the transition from paper-based media to the Web, the success of your communication depends on how well you adapt your content to the new medium and its context.
Some fundamental differences
If you're a step ahead of me, you may be thinking about some of the relative differences between paper-based and Web-based media.
Portability is one of the most obvious, if not superficial, differences. You can easily carry around a paper brochure, magazine, book, or newspaper. Admittedly, notebook computers and PDAs are small, portable, and self-contained, but for the most part, access to Web-based media requires several pieces of bulky equipment connected to a power supply. It will probably be a while before most morning commuters throw away their newspapers and read The Wall Street Journal on a wireless remote laptop.
Accessibility to information is a significant difference. Here is where Web-based media excels. The very nature of the Web means access to virtually unlimited information and interconnectivity among more than 25 million Web sites - all at the click of a mouse. The content of a book, magazine, or brochure is - however captivating - self-contained, finite, and relatively small. If you want or need more information from a book or magazine, it will take effort to go to the library or bookstore.
Interactivity is a key difference. This difference is one that the Web can, when implemented effectively, exploit. The nature of a visitor browsing a Web site implies interaction. To move from the home page to another page requires the visitor to do something, other than just read. Web-based media can be more than an electronic information delivery tool, but also be a complete marketing, sales, response, distribution, and support system; hence the terms dynamic and organic used previously. Indeed, one of the purposes of Sounding Line is to show how those tools can be developed and offer benefit to those who create Web sites.
By comparison, there is little else to do with a book, magazine, or brochure than to turn the page and continue reading. For the most part, the sales, distribution, and service activities, are found beyond the print medium's intended purpose.
Navigation is another difference between the two mediums. The navigational scheme of paper-based media tends to be very simple and straightforward. Books, such a novels, are linear, and you simply turn the page. In some novels, chapter divisions are relatively superfluous. By comparison, textbooks and reference books display a more sophisticated level of organization and include a table of contents and index to help the user locate specific information. Magazines and newspapers tend to be more free form, but simple to navigate nevertheless.
On the other hand, Web-based media presents a navigational challenge due to the nature of presenting information on a scrollable computer screen and hyper-linking among pages both inside and outside of the Web site. Also, navigating paper-based media is relatively easier because of our longstanding familiarity with handling books, magazines, and newspapers. Navigating a Web site is more difficult because finding your way around isn't necessarily intuitive, and because of the lack of uniform organization, content, design, and the few standards among Web sites. And finally, it's easy in paper-based media to know where you are, where you've been, and where you can go next. Not so in a Web site where you see only a part of the whole at any one time.
Inherent technology processes between print-based and Web media account for significant design and presentation differences. Most notable is the impact on the human eye and on user expectations. The technical capabilities of printing high-resolution images (text, photos, and graphics) on paper far exceed the ability of current technology monitors to display them. Simply put, images printed on paper are easier to read than images displayed on a computer screen. Try reading War and Peace on a computer screen (as presented on a book page) and you'll probably quit after the first few paragraphs. Because Internet users don't want to read long passages of small type on their computer screen, they expect that Web site designers will pay attention to readability issues. Also, the length of text and the number and quality of print images are simply "there" on the paper - they don't exist as electronic files with memory and download properties that need to be considered. I recently created a full-color book cover. The file that went to the printer was nearly 64 MB, while the JPEG graphic file for the publisher's online catalog was a mere 22 KB - what a difference!
Some user perceptions and expectations
Print media enjoys a long and well-established history. From clay tablets and papyrus scrolls to Gutenberg's printing press and current digital printing technology, people are familiar with the print media paradigm. They know how to use it and what to expect. But as predictable, fickle, or unfounded as their notions might be, people have certain ideas when it comes to how information is presented to them and how they want to use it. Your Web site, which will never please all the people all the time, needs to consider user perceptions and expectations.
If you've worked in an automated agency or insurance company for any length of time, you're familiar with computers. You use them for a significant portion of your workday, and you've already worked through a variety of usability issues. But despite how comfortable you are when using the Internet, you should not assume that all visitors to your Web site are equally as comfortable.
Since consumers of information have a choice of what, when, how, and why they use a particular communication medium, you should have some idea of how they perceive information resources. That's relatively easy. You're an information consumer, and if you're like most, your choices are probably most often guided by time, convenience, ease of use, and value.
Time is of the basic commodity of the Internet. Unlike strolling a shopping mall where you plan to spend hours of time, a user's time at a Web site is measured in seconds and minutes. From an information consumption perspective, some people make it a Sunday morning ritual to slowly peruse the New York Times. It matters little what content is delivered. The time spent lingering with "the paper" and coffee while wrapped in a warm terry cloth robe is an experience to be savored, and that's fine.
However, that method of information consumption is not very productive when instantly available and useful information is desired. When creating a Web site, people will use it if you can provide want they want quickly and without wasting their time. Thus, Web site design needs to consider the user's time.
Convenience is an important issue for the Internet user. If late night users wants to find information about the poisonous sea snakes of the Indian Ocean, they can use the Internet. And since the local library would likely be closed anyway, the Internet is a handy, convenient option. But what do poisonous sea snakes have to do with your agency? Nothing. But people probably think about insurance, as well as sea snakes and other mundane subjects, at the oddest times. Your Web site just may be the convenient insurance resource someone hopes to find.
Ease of use is an important, but often difficult, expectation to fulfill. Like the over-hyped ease of desktop publishing 15 years ago, building a good and effective Web site (one that can actually measure and deliver projected results) is not as easy as it seems. As soon as visitors enter your Web site (regardless of how they got there), they want to know two things: 1) Where am I? and 2) What's going on here? If they can't figure that out easily, they will leave. But if they decide to stay, your problem keeping them there long enough to meet their expectations depends on how easy you make it for them to use your site. Entire books have been written about Web site usability, which is probably the single most important factor in effective Web site design.
Value is ultimately what every Web site visitor wants. When visitors leave your site, they will pass judgment on it and determine whether or not the visit was worthwhile. If it wasn't, they will probably never visit your site again. If a visitor found your site worthwhile, congratulations! But be aware that when repeat visitors return, the value cycle starts all over.
Understanding the differences between paper-based and Web-based media plus how to meet the expectations of your Web site visitors are the first steps in moving beyond the electronic brochure. After that, there are a multitude of page design, content development, and site building considerations to think about. Unlike that once-and-done paper brochure, the Web site process never really seems to end.
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