This from an article on A List Apart:

Every business that settles for a poorly built badly managed website is doing nothing more than pulling the web down with them.

The future of the web lies with the web developers and designers; but what happens when the jobs go to the developers and designers who don’t care about the future of the web? The web remains stagnant or, worse, travels downward.

Sounds much like something I wrote recently.

Trouble is, the article, entitled Cheaper Over Better: Why Web Clients Settle for Less, was from 15 July 2001.

But that doesn’t mean you should use lots of them when presenting to a client:

We have an internal rule to never present more than 3 ideas to a client. Any more than that is confusing. Any more than that and you haven’t read the brief properly. You certainly haven’t answered the brief properly. So, we say never present more than 3. But I can’t remember the last time we showed a client 3 ideas. Usually it’s 2 and more often than not it’s just 1.

Taken from a Noisy Decent Graphics post discussing a recent conference where one of the speakers advised never to present more than 12 ideas.

The BBC reports on problems with the quantity of School Profiles available on a government information website. School Profiles are intended to replace governors’ reports in England.

Having visited the School Profiles website myself, I can confirm that it is dreadful, and I continue to be amazed at the amount of money spent on things like this which should be easy to implement well, if engineered by competent software developers.

These days you can buy one of those down the road at Curry’s for a couple of grand, so out goes the bog standard flatscreen and in comes the giant 60-foot, three-sided, high-resolution “Barco” video wall

From Huw’s wonder wall. Funny to see Barco in quotes. It’s a company, dudes. Sorry if I’m blasé about this, but Barco have been around for over 70 years and their graphics engines and displays are heavily used in defence, air traffic and medical systems.

Hint: Don’t call yourself a web designer if all you do is create skins for bulletin boards and blogs.

Windows Vista will have technology to allow newspaper publishers to mimic the physical experience of reading their newspaper, but do this on-line. Bill Gates says this will allow stories and pictures to look like the pages of a newspaper, and to allow users to flip through pages. The reason people flip through newspapers is to find stuff that they want to read and to get a general ‘view’ of what’s been happening. When you have an on-line newspaper you don’t need this. What you need is easy ways to search, aggregate and categorise content. And these already exist!

At the recent American Society of Newspaper Editors’ annual meeting there was a demonstration of a portable prototype, demonstrating how this reflows type and images to fit whatever screen they’re on. So, that’ll be a web browser then? It also showed stories in newspaper-like columns with interactive ads. Um, just like many on-line newspapers already?