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Web design? Think booksWebsites are not like newspapers, magazines or television. In fact,

they resemble the book more than any other medium.

One buys a book because of interest in a specific topic. This is how

users approach sites. A book requires total concentration, as does a

website. More important, books normally separate text and photos;

this is also something that should happen on websites.

In terms of writing, books keep us interested throughout the

narrative. Web sites should attempt to do the same. I believe that the

use of the traditional pattern of journalistic writing—the inverted

pyramid—may not be the best form to present information on news

sites. Instead, knowing that the average computer screen allows

about twenty-one lines of text before the user must scroll, we should

abandon the inverted pyramid for more of a champagne glass struc-

ture, where every twenty-one lines or so the writer makes an effort

to keep us interested. Anyone who likes champagne knows that

every time the glass is empty, it is nice to have it refilled, and to

watch new bubbles rise to the surface.

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Easy to digest: For the publishers of the Meyers-Briggs personality test,Miller Media created an e-commercesite to highlight current products.Even at the deepest levels of the site,long running text was condensed, withstories edited into bite-sized chunksto pull readers through.

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The influence of books: Book design clearlydelineates image from text, also useful in Webdesign. But the story can also employ multiplepoints of entry. When Miller Media publisheda visual biography of the life of MuhammadAli, the color images and running text told thestory of his career. But another layer wasadded: readers could flip through the bookand read the highlights of Ali’s life through aseries of large scannable captions and quotes.

pure design

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