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Sketching the siteStep into the front office of Reality Mechanics and you'll find just what you'd expect from a branch of a giant multinational advertising agency circa 1997: bright blue-and-ochre paint job, slightly hip music, and a copy of the Australian Financial Review on the reception-area coffee table to remind the clients that the firm thinks about money as well as decor. Go down the corridor, turn left, cut through a store room-cum-utility area, and you come to a tiny corner office with coffee-stained carpets, dog-eared graphics books, a hefty-looking tape player and well-stocked Apple Macintosh computers where designers like Mark Hill, Simon Mawdesley and Rob Raulings work their tricks.The RealMech Apples are stocked with the normal tools of the website designer's trade: a simple text editor, an HTML editor (theirs is the Mac program, BBEdit), a simple text editor for quick page changes, and Adobe Photoshop for graphics. But Hill, Raulings and Mawdesley turn first to the time-honored paper and pencil, to sketch the site's home page, the area which will direct visitors to the information they want.
An early Reality Mechanics sketch shows the site's basics in one of the oldest design mediums around - pencil and paper Some of the decisions come easily. The site needs several separate pages: one to describe, explain and reassure people about the company; another for the firm's flagship 29-day Australian Summer Adventure; a third to show the firm's surfing tours; and so on. Much of the text will come from promotional material which that Southern Horizon already puts out in brochures. Darren Minns has supplied more than 30 photos, which will be scanned and turned into Web-ready art. This much is standard. But as Darren Minns has found during a week surfing the Web for the first time, one website can look like another. Southern Horizon needs more. No colored balls, pleaseThe spark comes from the company's existing artwork, by Darren's wife Liza. Her simple, distinctive two-color illustrations of Australian icons such as the Sydney Harbor Bridge, kangaroos and Uluru make ideal, fast-loading Web graphics and can easily become a memorable motif for the site, for page backgrounds and to represent clickable links in the "navigation bar" which will move visitors around the site. The RealMech team will also use a Netscape innovation called JavaScript on this homepage navigation bar. People who visit the page using Netscape Navigator 3 will see the icons light up as their mouse passes over them. While Hill and Raulings will use Liza Minns' visuals to break the Web mould, they'll also use Macromedia Director, the industry-standard multimedia authoring tool. They were lucky: they learnt Director, with its complex Lingo scripting language, before the Web arrived. Then Macromedia temporarily cornered the market on Web multimedia with its Shockwave plug-in for playing Director presentations. "Shocked" sites now cover the sophisticated end of the Net. While they're creating the pages of the Southern Horizon site, the RealMech team also fires up Director to create a game which will keep visitors at the site long enough for it to make an impression. The game must also be a small download, or many Web surfers won't wait for it to load. As all these tricks are brought to bear, Darren Minns begins to think his is one site which that might stick in the minds of young, adventurous Americans - his target market. |
  
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Part III: Reaching the Horizon