But although the media differ, the tenets of story-telling are much the same. Obviously marketing on the web is different than telling stories around a cattle- drive campfire. And finally, for the stories to succeed, they have to be told well, in a compelling, mature, engaging narrative voice. For the stories to succeed, they also have to be told in the native tongue of the listeners (read: no JavaScript errors). Stories affect our entire beings, not just our minds.Īnd which stories will be remembered the longest? Which stories will be loved the most? Which stories will “succeed?” For the stories to succeed they first have to be interesting (read: good content). It’s the stories that the cowboys will remember after the drive, not the daily exchange of data. But at night, around the fire, stories are told. This work-day data exchange might be analogous to a multi-user, Lotus Notes(tm) collaboration. After that, we should stop and water ‘em along the crick.”ĭuring the work day, mere data is exchanged. When cowboys talk to each other on a cattle drive, they say things like, “Hey Tex, three of the herd went up in them there hills. Even then, we’re still missing a huge factor: narrative voice. Then, the content has to be useful to the site’s audience. First, the design has to somehow be relevant to the content, accurately representing its purposes in the medium. We think that if we have meaty content, and we have competent professional design, then we have a winning web site. Returning to the style and content dichotomy, now aware of the hyper-techno- centric nature of the web, it’s obvious that we’re thinking too small. Media are the modes in which we communicate with each other via those tools. A satellite dish is a hardware component used to transfer information from one person to another person. No one would mistake a satellite dish for a communications medium. It can read media it can make media it can display media it can broadcast media. But note, a lone desktop, adrift from the web, does not constitute a communications medium. And we geeks still think the web has something to do with computers. The second reason the web as a medium is so wrapped up in technology is because it was birthed in the computer lab of a particle physics research center. This many to many communications model has placed a greater technological burden on the web end user so much so, that we still call our visitors “users” – not “viewers” or “movie-goers” or even “explorers.” Sometimes we do call them “visitors” or “surfers,” but even those two titles imply a fair amount of end-user expertise. If nothing else, they have at least sent email or posted to a bulletin board. Now on the web, many of our visitors are also themselves publishers. ![]() If that didn’t work, you called a TV repairman. Maybe you fiddled with the antenna a bit. Before, no one had to be aware of how a TV set actually worked. Tools like Blogger have made self-publishing on the web a no- brainer. In older mass media, say television, few people produced and broadcast their own TV shows. Why is technology so interwoven with the web?įor one reason, the web is a many-to-many technology. Never before have the participants in a medium been so required to learn arcane, technical incantations before they are allowed to communicate in said medium (which explains the continuing appeal of AOL to the new Internet user). Never before has a medium’s technology been so transparent, so “just below” the surface. Never before in the history of mass media has a medium been so overtly dependent on its technology. ![]() The web is first and foremost a medium of communication. I’ll call this missing element a “narrative voice.” You can have your slick style and your meaty content, but without a mature and perspicacious narrative voice, your site will still fail to engage your visitors. And I think it’s the most important element of all. In addition to style and content (even understood in their broadened definitions), I propose that there is at least a third element in the web design mix that is getting overlooked. And content is an idea, an angle, surely conveyable in text, but also conveyable in these other, more rich, media. Style is a comprehensive site-wide look and feel that includes graphics, animation, audio, and any number of other media besides just text. I’d like to take that point one step further by saying that style is more than various methods of typographical presentation, and content is more than the literal words in a paragraph that some marketing guy wrote. 3 days of design, code, and content for web & UX designers & devs.Ī recent article right here at ALA took the bold step of suggesting that maybe style and content aren’t so easily separable after all.
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