> > They have visions? Hmmm... Oh yes, I think I have had clients who
> > had visions! Hallucinations, more like it! Getting them to have
> > functionalities in their heads is the hard part.
>
> Often, vision is what many of the people I deal with do best. They are
> entreprenurial visionaries who've hired people like me to bring them to
> life.
Very true. And those are the kinds of contracts I really enjoy,
because it lets my kind of imagination shine as well.
> > But yes, visions, imagination IS important as a starting point. But
> > vision needs to be distilled over and over again till one has something
> > that is both visionary, and more important, Functional.
> > Mostly, I build nuts and bolts stuff, using scripts to turn large
> > documents in to knowledge structures, etc. It is a different kind of
> > imagination that sparks that, than what inspires a beautiful graphical
> > site. But on today's web, it is the words that get indexed in the search
> > engines, and the search engines which bring most of the traffic.
>
> Let's draw that out a step further. The words will get a site indexed, the
> search engine brings in the traffic, but what KEEPS them there? Speaking
> for myself, I may click on that #1 site in the search engine. But if, when
> I arrive, the site is laid out like a maze, the graphics are glaringly
> obnoxious or large or full of jaggies, that screams "non-professional" to
> me, and I won't *stay* at a site. Why should I believe their words if they
> don't care enough about them to package them nicely?
Yes, sites for public consumption do need to be reasonably neat,
clean, and EASILY navigable.
I boosted user retention about 20% when I put navigation bars at the
top and bottom of the web pages at Mall-Net. All the nav-bars are, are
related keywords linked to other pages on the site.
> Face it - would you eat steak if it looked and smelled like dog poop? (for
> the vegans out there - substitute the couscous, lentils, etc :>)
(Stop describing my cooking!) It all depends on how hungry one is. If
you are hungry enough, you will eat grass and dirt, the way the Irish did
during some of their famines. I read some of the accounts, and have dealt
with some of the seemingly genetic abberitions -- "Wilson's Syndrome",
common among the Irish, is a disposition to a lower body temperature which
results in a slow deterioration of health because the enzymatic processes
of life are running too slow to keep up with wear. 98.2 (F) is said to be
the point below which one needs worry. I often end up running at 96.8...
(Famines were not confined to Ireland, despite what Dr. Wilson wrote. See
http://www.mall-net.com/mcs/coldbody.html for more details.)
> Lisa, who does the scripty thang too, the "knowledge structure" (nice
> phrase, btw!) as well, but who likes it to be attractive and palatable.
Attractive has little to do with it. Most of the knowledge
structures I have created were disposable -- crank it out via script, let
them use it for a few weeks, then throw the half gig of crap out. Some of
those things took overnight for my old 486 to crank out, and some close to
a day. Some take longer to crank out than to get value from! But once the
structure of the knowledge has been apprehended, and the "hot spots" found,
it becomes an "it's so obvious" thing. It's just that before they looked
at it, it wasn't obvious at all! Why? They were just looking in the
wrong place or from the wrong perspective.
The thing the web lacks, is a fold-able hierarchical stack to let you
see a true outline of where you have been. It is a form of learning you
can share with others.
But I guess I've lost all of you... and I am running too cold to
explain it in detail.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------------- IMAGINEERING --------------------------
----------------- Every mouse click, a Vote -------------------
---------- Do they vote For, or Against your pages? -----------
----- What people want: http://www.mall-net.com/se_report/ ----
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