In fact, the whole idea of a "cool" Web site turns me off. I have never had a client suggest that we needed a "cool" marketing campaign. Not a single client or prospect has ever asked me for "cool" ideas about how to improve their business. But somehow, every time we talk about the Web, the word "cool" comes up.

I'm not going to talk here about "cool" Web sites. I'm going to talk about effective Web sites. If you want to evaluate your own site or the sites of others, or the work of a consultant whom you've engaged to put a Web site together for you, then here's a way to do that. I call them the Five I's for Evaluating Web Sites.

A good Web site needs to do the following.

It should have lots of information. It should allow individuals to use the information when and as they choose. It should make the information and the site as interesting as possible. It should be interactive in a variety of ways. It should be integrated with a company's entire marketing and business plan..

Information

The Net, and the Web, is an information medium. Partially, that's for technological reasons -- many of the entertainment technologies that will spice up the Web aren't quite ready for prime time yet. But mostly, the Web is an information medium because it allows you to put a lot of information up at a fairly low price. One industrial pump manufacturer, for example, has put up hundreds of pages of product specifications. Several companies have put up page after page of linked information about who they are and what they do and the kinds of services and benefits they provide.

A great Web site will have a lot of information that's relevant to the people that you want to reach. That information should have both breadth and depth.

Breadth means that there's lots of different kinds of information there for the people that you're trying to reach. Depth, on the other hand, means that they'll be able to go as deep as they want into the information when they visit your site.

A good Web site will also give you lots of different ways to get the information. It's obvious that reading it off the screen is one way, but most good sites also offer a way to get the file using either an auto responder or FTP.

Individual

You've heard a lot about the one-to-one future. Here it is. A great Web site allows an individual to get the information he or she wants, when and as they want it. That's just not possible with any other medium that I can think of.

One way to judge this is to try to determine if there are more individual paths through the information and connections than you can count. If there are, there are probably lots of individual solutions. Each person comes to the information in their own way and they follow their own particularly chosen set of links. That means that when you design your site, you're going to want to put as many links in there as you possibly can.

Serving the individual also means making it easy for people to get to information. The first, most obvious component of that is speed.

A Web page, basically, is a collection of files that are viewed by a browser. In order for the browser to see the files, they have to load. We've found that people will wait about 10 seconds tops to see information on a site if they haven't already established that site's value in their mind.

That means that your site needs to come up in about 10 seconds. If the average person hitting your Web page is using a 14.4 modem, then that means about 20k of files for the initial pages.

Now there are exceptions to this. Take the ZIMA site for example. ZIMA markets to a hip, young audience. That audience is intrigued, and interested in fancy Web site design. For that reason, the dense graphics and the long load times on the ZIMA site probably aren't a problem for their audience.

Another exception is any time that people have established the value of information in their mind prior to coming to your page. If they've done that, then they'll wait pretty much as long as it takes. Here, a good site to check out is the Ragu site. Ragu's a popular site because it's interesting. People who've been to the site already know that and will wait for pages to load. Other people have heard how interesting and fun the site is from others, and they're likely to wait as well.

Both of those are exceptions that you simply can't count on. If you a need the kind of graphic or text files that will take a while to load, you have two choices. You can make sure that you establish their value for your visitors or you can change their frame of reference.

Establishing value means that you don't put the heavy slow loading graphics on the first pages that people come to. Use those pages as a way to establish the value of your larger pages.

Then, when you have a link to one of the larger pages, let people know that it will take a little time to load. A simple statement like, "This link has some pretty big graphics and will take a little while to load, so be patient." will go a long way to make sure that people actually are patient and will wait.

In addition to speed of loading, you should also look at making it easy for people to get around your site. Icons should make sense. In fact, it's probably a good idea to be redundant here. Use the icon with a little text notice beneath it. The extra file space isn't outrageous and it really makes things easier for people.

Pay attention to where you put your navigation links on the page. Most folks seem to want to put their navigation buttons at the bottom of the page, but I feel like putting them toward the top of the page is a lot more effective. That way, folks don't have to scroll to the bottom to find the buttons, they can use them right away.

Keep the buttons consistent from one part of your site to another. Don't make folks relearn the navigation language.

There's one more concern that we should talk about here. Which browser should you design for?

Right now, the Netscape Navigator is the single most popular browser on the Web. Depending on who you listen to, Netscape has somewhere between 50 and 85% of all the browsers bouncing around the Web. You can do lots of neat designing using the extensions that Netscape has developed for use with its browser. These are almost always well ahead of their use by other browsers. But there's a problem.

The problem is that people who aren't using a Netscape browser can feel unwanted. Now that includes all of the people who are using browsers from the commercial services like America Online and CompuServe. It includes people using other browsers simply because they like them better for certain feature sets. The way lots of places get around this is to put a Netscape page up and then say that the page looks best when viewed with Netscape. They often offer the option to download the latest version of Netscape.

That's a solution that I don't like because it says to the person coming to your site hey, you weren't smart enough to get Netscape so we're going to offer it to you here.

Another solution is to design for as many browsers as possible. That works in terms of customer relations, but leaves out a lot of the really nice design features that designing for Netscape can give you.

Another solution is to design two sets of pages. One set of pages works with Netscape, the other works with other browsers. That's the solution that I like best. It's getting even easier now that there are ways to do this on the fly, meaning that the software makes the change automatically once it determines what kind of browser a visitor has.

What we're after here is to make your site such that every individual can find what they want, when and as they need it, and as easily as possible.

Interesting

OK, you've got information, and you've given people lots of different ways to get it and to move around your site. What's going to get them back to your site? For that to happen, your site needs to be interesting.

The most important point here is that your site needs to be interesting to the visitor. What's interesting to you may not be interesting to him or her.

If you want to see how that can happen, just check out most of the corporate sites currently out there on the World Wide Web. I call them "logocentric," meaning that the most important thing on the page is the corporate logo. I even found one page for an entrepreneur where the only thing you see when you bring up the page is a picture of the entrepreneur himself. You don't even know who he is without moving further into the site. You can find out what's important to the people visiting your site by seeing what kinds of things they ask about or click on. You can ask your clients, prospects, and friends ahead of time what kinds of information they most want from you and then make sure that information is on your site.

After you've done that, you have to make things interesting informationally, and from a design standpoint.

Information starts out as being relevant. That means relevant to the visitor and useful for him or her. You should know how to do that.

Recency also helps build interest. People like news, they like novelty. They'll revisit your site if they can count on finding something new there every time they show up.

One of the ways to do this is to use things like contests, surveys, and games. Another way is to use design elements that are interesting.

As more and more design tools are developed for the World Wide Web, you're going to have a broader array of options that will allow you to make things interesting. Right now, the JAVA programming language gives you the possibility for animations and other active items on the page. Real audio gives you an option for sound. Both of these are the kinds of design elements that can help bring people back because you've got an interesting site.

Interactive

Just getting them to the site with good information and design is not enough. You want to involve them as much as you can. We said earlier that people want individual solutions. In other words you want to give them as much control as possible. Making your site as interactive as possible is one way to do that.

There are lots of devices you can use to get people to take actions on your site and get some feedback. The most obvious one is to maximize the number of links which in turn maximizes the number of clicks. A click is an action. It's an involvement device. It gives people control.

In addition to just basic clicks, consider conducting a survey or holding a contest. If you do that, and you give people the opportunity to play or respond, you should also be religious about getting back to them with the results.

A nice variation on this is to have some kind of diagnostic instrument that they can take. Take a look at the SRI site where they talk about their IVALS (Internet Values and Lifestyles) survey.

SRI is conducting a survey of Internet users to determine the psychographic profiles. That's just like their regular VALS system in the physical world.

Visitors to the site complete a questionnaire and then get feedback about which VALS type is theirs. At the same time, SRI gets one more data point for their survey.

Another thing to consider is games. This is a somewhat limited option right now. But there's lots of software and technology being developed that will make it possible soon for people to come to your site and actually play games that are interactive. You're likely also to see private areas with special games designed just for specific subscribers.

Don't underestimate the importance of this interactivity. We have decades of research data about the importance of involvement and control in building relationships. We know that people who take an action are more likely to become involved with a particular company even if that action is not directly related to the involvement. We know that study after study confirms that people who feel in control of the buying experience tend to be more satisfied with the experience and to buy more. We're just talking here about the World Wide Web applications of that data.

Integrated

Whatever is on your Web site should work together with your other materials, your total program, and everything else on that site.

To some extent we're looping back here to our discussion of making things easy for people. Common logos, layouts, and page designs help people be comfortable and use your site more effectively.

Your site should also be integrated with all of your other materials. That means that you use the same logos, slogans, language, and corporate identity elements on your Web site that you use in your printed material and electronic media.

Finally, and most importantly, your Web site needs to be integrated into your total business. When we begin designing sites for our business clients, we ask them to define the strategic purpose of their site. That can be lots of different things. The important thing is to have a clear, strategic objective for your Web site that fits in with, and supports, your overall strategic purposes and organization.

Conclusion

Those are the basics. They may or may not give you a cool Web site. They probably aren't the same criteria that those people who do the cool Web site lists use. But they're a list of solid, business-related design principles that we found works on the World Wide Web. Use them to evaluate your own designs and use them when you look at other designs to see if they're elements you want to adopt.

The World Wide Web, and using it in business, is brand new. We're still learning certain things, but these principles should stand you in good stead for years ahead.