[thelist] Cut some bait, have a soda

[John Dowdell]

I'm snipping shamelessly here, using Ray's comments more as a springboard
than directly replying to them:

> As an Engineer, I want to produce a stable, reliable end result
> that is accessible and intuitive to anyone who wants to use it.
> I'd much rather take the responsibility of creating a high-end
> version and a low-end version that degrade gracefully than have
> to tell a large portion of potential users to sod off....
> Pepsi is a perfect example.  Their marketing staff with surely
> want something flashy at the inception, but after they realize
> that a large portion of their target audience (ie, the every-day
> citizen) will either get error messages or a broken version of
> the site because they have old browsers, or non-upgradable browsers
> (like WebTV, or many of the internet appliance devices that are
> coming out these days), they might change their tune to something
> still pretty, but less detrimental to the userbase.


So... I went to http://www.pepsi.com/ .... ;-)

This had a redirect to PepsiWorld, a consumer-oriented site. The initial
layout has three frames, HTML of 10K or less in each frame, and a variety
of well-compressed GIFs. There are 24 links on the main page, broken into
two main sections, but it isn't all that hard to navigate. Once past this
main level there's a variety of rich content (SWF, DCR, video, etc).

I then went to the corporate page, http://www.pepsico.com, also a
three-frame site which loads pretty nicely. The main frame takes four
scrolls to traverse, but the bulk of the content is a clear list of
individual announcements. There are a half-dozen videos linked off this
splash page.


Then I went to the market leader, http://www.cocacola.com/ .

Then I went to http://www.royalcrowncola.com/ .


I guess my point here is that attractiveness, effectiveness and usability
may not need to be mutually exclusive options. I suspect that there may be
varying approaches depending upon the varying audiences, and the various
messages which clients wish to convey.

Nothing you didn't already know, I realize... just gave me a chance to do
some surfing and work up a thirst, that's all.... ;-)

jd






John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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