>This is a pretty good list. One question, though:
>
> When is eye candy justified?
>
>Ever?
A: when having fun is okay.
not every site on the web needs to be universally accessible, or
user-friendly to the greatest possible number of people. the rule beneath
the rule is that you should pay attention to the tradeoffs when you make
one design choice over another. simplicity doesn't impress people who
like eye candy and tech-toys, but it crashes a lot fewer web browsers.
hot effects will keep the neophiles happy, but alienate the people who just
want information.
the reason most of us on the list take turns jumping up & down on things
like splash screens is that broad-band appeal is a very common requirement
in the commercial web biz. there's a widespread misconception that flash
draws users to a site, and that all you have to do to become the next
Yahoo! is pile a few more megs of cruft into your pages. the proponents
of that meme are close to being right.. they just don't realize that
there's a difference between being a yahoo and being a Yahoo!.
the deep, dark secret of accessible web design is that it's much easier to
spend lots of time creating an "engaging and conceptually challenging" site
than it is to create an interface that's clean and useful. to make flash
work, you need a good eye. the make a site useful, you have to understand
the content well enough to make it easy for someone else to use.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
