Contentions
We're now in full force Web site re-design mode at Percussion. I've been hinting at this for a while now, but today made it official - the project is under way. I've taken on Percussion.com personally in this, not just a manager. So for the first time in a while I've been down in the trenches of Web site design, reviewing assessments of the current HTML, CSS, and other site functions in preparation for (thankfully) throwing most of them out. It was refreshing but also telling.
A bit of history first. I was the guy who built our first 16 page Web site back in 1996, less than a year after starting at Percussion. It was done purely in Notepad and the biggest technical achievement was that the pages all had "background images" which was a new and controversial thing back then. That version of the site is so old you can't find it on any of those nifty web archive sites because the Web was still too new for anyone to bother archiving it. (I was also the one who told my bosses "dude, you guys have to go get Percussion.com as a domain name NOW because these things won't last long!" but then somehow totally missed the significance of that statement and made zero money for me or Percussion from that whole Web thing that went on from 97 to 99. Ok, enough history, we got there eventually.)
Anyway, at one point I found myself casually asking "do they still use spacer.gif?" I was looked at like someone who'd asked how to put a cassette tape into an iPod. If you missed the era, "Spacer.gif" was the first form of organized hackery that I experienced. The early Web frowned on specific spacing elements (ask the SGML purists why). Since humans actual respond well to spaces, Web designers just routed around the priests of SGML to get around it. Designers would just make blank images of the various pixel widths you desired, for everything from tabs to even table like structures and then place them wherever you needed to force the issue. There were often scores of "spacer.gif" images of various lengths all over the better looking Web sites back then.
Today of course we have CSS, and layers, and DIV tags and JavaScript and everything else. I wasn't actually that naive. What I was really wondering is, "do you still pretty much have to hack stuff all over the place to get the Web to work or look like you want?" After a short tour of the CSS and JavaScript on any decent site I was comforted to know that - yep - pretty much, you do.
This is because the unique Web embrace of things like "spacer.gif" was never about technical immaturity (witness Web 2.0's "perpetual beta" as the most recent example). The attitude embodied in spacer.gif was much more a fundamental attitude of "who cares if it's not elegant, as long as it works?!" The Web is fundamentally about "incrementalism." Try it. If it works, good, do more. If not, stop it and move on (and be glad you didn't put too much effort into it).
What's even more exciting is that this revolutionary embrace of "whatever works" is starting to creep up everywhere, from online marketing to the hard sciences. Call it the "Wisdom of Crowds" or "emergent behaviors" - it is everywhere. It seems even the purists now understand that elegant centralized "omniscient" systems, don't drive things nearly as well as massive decentralized "behavioral" systems that don't try to understand so much as test, react and respond automatically. Spacer.gif truly deserves a spot of it's own in some progress hall of fame.
Oh, by the way, I did keep a backup copy of that old 16 page Web site. I'll post it somewhere for fun - as soon as I can find a computer that can still read a floppy disk.
Some years back, folks my age all laughed at the "12:00 AM" blinking on our parents VCRs. Here these folks had a great piece of technology, and they couldn't even set the clock!?! (Today, even knowing what a VCR is probably dates us.) Well, today it's our turn to be laughed at - because all too often, the corporate internet is a giant blinking 12:00 AM blaring away for all to see. Only today, it's blaring at our customers and prospects.
It's not like those of us with "brochureware" sites want them to be this way (cough, cough, we're working very hard on ours too right now). But then again, our parents knew it wasn't 12AM all day long either. The reason they never bothered to set the clock, wasn't really the complexity or the time. To them the reasons were simple:
- It was new.
- They already had a clock that worked just fine and was probably easier to see from the couch anyway.
In short, it was seen as some kind of minor annoyance that didn't add much value. It was something they could wait for the kids to fix when they dropped by next. The problem with this was that the clock wasn't there to be a clock. It was there to let them record shows and watch them later at their leisure. By not setting the clock they were missing out on capabilities.
Now, for those of you about to jump up and proudly point to your leading edge Web presence, ask yourself first - who did these features for you? Remember, if the local neighbor's kid set your parents clock for them, it would only work until the next power outage. The Web is even worse. If you are dependent on some crew of young "kids" (e.g. outside experts) you're just waiting for the next shift in Web usage to pass you by.
The solution requires first hand experience. Because like that VCR clock, some of this stuff probably is ready for prime time anyway (it took the DVR to finally get it right). You need to know what works and what doesn't. There are no excuses either. A 13-year old is NOT "more technical" than you. Chances are, if you were one of those people setting your parent's VCR clock, you got it wrong a bunch of times until you finally figured out the right way to set it. The difference is always in having the motivation to see the value in plugging away.
So before you dive in on that Web revitalization project, or harangue someone else over "your" site, do a bit of self examination first. Have you posted a comment to a Web site lately? Participated in an online forum? Created a Blog? Clicked "edit" while visiting a Wiki? Clicked that RSS thingy in the address bar? Set up a Facebook page? Not your staff, or your Web team, or that kid you hired out of college - but you - the manager, the executive, the decision maker, the one about to authorize that purchase?
Time to get up off that couch and set that blinking clock yourself. The 13-year-olds are watching.
