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FOR most of the Web's brief life, a "cool" site has, by definition, lived on the edge. The very first official Cool Site Of The Year (CSOTY) was The Spot, which in 1995 redefined Web publishing with an evolving online soap opera. In 1996 the CSOTY gong went to Discovery Online, which was running a high-cost, high-tech, high-feedback science/adventure site full of JavaScripting, browser redirects and the like. And 1997's gong was grabbed by BeZerk, an intricately coded weekly quiz show site full of music and stunning graphics.
That brings us to the recent announcement of the latest Cool Site Of The Year (at www.coolsiteoftheday.com/csoty). The new Champion of the Universe is How Stuff Works, available in your nearest Web browser at www.howstuffworks.com. Its simple mission is to teach people how things work in the world. Your refrigerator, the stock market, Boolean logic, your immune system... howstuffworks.com explains them all, whether you're doing homework or just browsing for fun.
The first surprise: How Stuff Works works a lot like a book. It opens with a big table of contents that lists all the dozens of articles by category -automotive, food, "Things you see in public" (like water towers). Below that is a "Power Panel", repeated on every page, which directs you to the search facility, legal disclaimers, an e-mail page and the like. It's not about interaction, "community" or anything Johannes Gutenberg wouldn't have recognised.
Second surprise: in its coding, howstuffworks.com is as common as muck. If you can write HTML, you could code How Stuff Works. No JavaScript, no Dynamic HTML, no Flash, no RealAudio, no version 4.0 browser-specific code of any type. Its only technical, interactive feature of any note is a fairly primitive site search engine. Again, it bears no resemblance to earlier CSOTY winners.
Third surprise: How Stuff Works springs from the mind of a man eminently qualified to create an all-singing, all-dancing, dynamic/interactive/scripted Web site par excellence. Creator Marshall Brain (his real name, as far as I can tell) used to teach computer science at university; he has also written nine books on subjects such as coding Windows NT applications in C++.
Why does howstuffworks.com work so well? Brain's unusually wide-ranging intelligence must take some of the credit: he's interested in everything. And while the Nobel Prize for literature isn't in his future, he also writes prose you can understand.
Brain uses Glad Wrap to explain the sound of a guitar; he expounds on refrigeration with the help of an imaginary oven-dweller at home in temperatures of 400 degrees. One way or another, he takes the fundamental workings of our machines and ideas, and pours them out of his head and into yours. That's a wonderful skill anywhere, but particularly on the time-pressured Internet.
But another part of the explanation is that Brain has nothing to prove in the technology stakes. With all that programming expertise, he doesn't feel challenged to create fancy, inscrutable, cutting-edge interfaces. He clearly feels perfectly free to pour all of his considerable passion into communicating ideas well.
That's the Brain recipe: not much interface, lots of content. How Stuff Works's ratio of content to interface ranks among the lowest anywhere on the Web.
And this content-to-interface ratio too often gets overlooked, because site designers are too busy scrutinising the delights of cutting-edge interface.
Contrast How Stuff Works with a site like Scroll (http://scroll.behaviour.com). Scroll looks like early-1999 state-of-the-art site designer heaven, complete with DHTML, audio, Flash, the whole shebang. Chances are that you will remember its presentation of Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum long after you forget the actual words and pictures.
Now Scroll is a demonstration site; it's all about interface. Trouble is, Scroll and sites like it tend to act as role models not just for interface but for the site as a whole. Before you know it, Web projects are spending all their time on interface and none on content, editorial, ideas. This isn't theory; it's how Web design has actually been for at least two years.
The alternative is the Brain recipe: spend a little time on interface and a lot of time on content. Push hard to raise that content-interface ratio. Now that it's an award-winner, the Brain recipe might just be the new recipe for Cool.
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