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As an authentic, card carrying SCG, I routinely introduce others to the wonderful world of Linux, most of whom are impoverished students, desperately clining to to a life-expired WinXP box bursting with viruses. For the past 4 or so years, I have been able to take a CD, boot from it, show them its really not more different than moving to Vista, except that it actually works.

Install it,
???
Prophet
Well actually, give them a few hours of practice, and return a fortnight later, and add the features they have missed.

I recently tried to upgrade my own Ubuntu machine. Unity is not compatible with my graphics card - Ubuntu actually said so, but installed it anyway as the default WM, leaving the machine unusable. I eventually managed to reinstall it avoiding the evil.

Then I went to install it on someone else's laptop. The default Unity installation is not actually usable. Someone's idea of intuitive is presumably based on some world from an arcade game I have never seen, and I was not able so identify what any of the icons were (I did eventually recognise the firefox one).

I was not able to configure the system in a sensible amount of time - and the lack of hierarchical menu structure was a total show stopper, and the owner demanded a return to XP.

There you have the problem: XP is MILES better than Unity! If that is the best they can do, then "batshit crazy" is indeed an accurate assessment of Canonical.

Anyone who thinks UI that requires mousovers t work needs a brain tranplant. 30 years of computing should have taught people that menus (with WORDS in) are readable and understandable by everyone who understands the relevant language. Icons are often understood by no one. (You can visit http://www.websitesthatsuck.com/ if you reall NEED to known how not to do it, but it seems the Unity developers already did.

Unix's success is that it can be customised. If you want locked down stuff, Unix will do it - or you can buy "the other brand".

I have no problem with Unity as an alternative, but before they make it a default, it needs to at least half-work on older machines, and be usable when its installed - which means hierarchical menus structure is BLOODY essential!

Good sources for design by example:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/
how to present quantitative information and get to the essence: less is more.

http://www.garrreynolds.com/
many examples on messages and negative space

http://www.websitesthatsuck.com/
intelligent checklists of what to do and stunningly great what not to do examples. Excellent walk through for "the boss" who might really, really, want to have that musical gif with the dog playing the banjo on the first page along side the waving flag/support our troops light show...

Test: Consider too how customers, et.al.,will access the site.

Make the dog food, eat the dog food. If the users are coming through a network jinking like a moth in flight from a bat, that big ass wonderful "thing" may well and truly blow chunks. Demo on the LAN, or on the desktop: bad thing. What's the implementation environment?

If users are urban with high capacity networks, fatter images etc. can be less of a problem. But if you're trying to reach, say, people "on the road" or in dial up land, test with their environments. I recall one rule of thumb that suggested that 4 seconds is about the design budget for the first page to show up.

In turn, consider also testing with at least a couple of current and backlevel browsers to catch major pains.

Go for basic function/message first. Avoid the scripting etc. until the site is stabilized and (most)people smile.

Is it to support the operations of your business as well as communicate to your customers and partners? The ops/innards pieces, to me at least, are very different in terms of look, function, and feel. Separate these requirements from the messaging; creeping functionality kills.

Who Is The Decider?

Who is writing content? Who is editing content?

Frame up a few questions such as "who should we look like vis a vis competition, which customers and prospects are of interest, what's our brand, etc." If you get a glazed look go for the neat gif mailboxes and spinning blinkenlights and declare a victory. If the idea of integrated messaging and corporate (organizational) image are not big in the culture, well shucks, I'd go for beige on beige.

Java Complete, by Sybex. That book touts itself as a cheap book to learn Java and even has a good dump of the APIs at the end of the book. That said, it has got to be one of the most poory assembled books on Java I have seen.

If it's anything like the HTML book I bought a few years ago, then the Java book is probably a compilation of various chapters from other, more in-depth books published by Sybex, and priced low (like $20). It's meant to be a "sampler" to entice you to shell out for the other titles. The only interesting chapter I found in HTML Complete was from Web Sites that Suck, which was outdated probably before publication, and several of the chapters (and the CSS reference) were IE-specific, so I'm not sure it was a good buy even at 20 bucks.

And the flash demo keeps hanging.

In fact why is this even a slashdot story.. I think it really belongs on websitesthatsuck.com!

Try www.ford.com to see how not to do it ...

I wanted a list of Ford Dealers to buy a spare part. I cant wait 30 mins for their flash crap to load, I can WALK to a Ford dealer quicker than that!

If someone uses Flash on their site, its a fair bet they DONT WANT CUSTOMERS TO VIEW IT.

A visit to Web Sites That Suck is recommended, especially to all car manufactuerers.

Incidentally, will these foolish things hang your PC if you don't have a sound card?

I have set Opera to identify as "Opera" - will that avoid the download time?

I talked with United Airlines a couple years ago about how bad their site was, bulky, difficult to navigate, lacking information and the IT guy I talked with agreed, but it was already their *new* site.

Too many minds don't think three dimensionally and others think a presense on the the web is all that it takes to succeed, although that old paradigm should be breathing its last gasp, after the fall out of the past year.

It's the duty of every websurfer not just to point out difficult to navigate or uninformative sites to webmasters. I take the opportunity whenever I can. Some appreciate input, others seem to ignore it (maybe it's a precious design, close to their heart and criticism hurts too much to ever consider that they may be wrong.) Telling someone their site or design sucks isn't going to improve anything, now it's worth emailing bad site hosts and designers and telling them about a book they might read. Include this link, too.

FWIW, I come from the school of design where it doesn't have to look pretty, but better work. Checkout my own site and feel free to tell me how much I don't live up to that ;-)

And as for Flash, I'm sorry but I have created and seen plenty of navigation schemes that are more efficient than constantly sending http requests back to the server to get a bit more info on something. (and oh yeah it's included on all new browser installers and 90% of the browsers in use)

ps. who's going to McDonalds.com on a 28.8 or going there at all, really...

<//-------------//>
"I like /. but you can tell it was designed by programmers..."

Key issues to do this is separating presentation from content (thanks to the use of style sheets), providing alternate content when appropriate (using ALT tags as well as the much-welcomed OBJECT tag), and in general, making sure to validate the HTML code you write (just as you would use "use Strict" in perl, or compile your programs for errors in C or other languages).

Unfortunately, I'd estimate 90% of commercial websites (and a larger percentage of personal pages) do not follow the above. The crap of HTML tag soup that FrontPage and other HTML authoring software puts out is poor quality, and while it's ok to set up the basic HTML, most good authors know they have to clean up the tag soup before putting it out. Even then, too many people try to force HTML into acting like a desktop publishing language.

What will help is the blind accessibly lawsuit against AOL. Before that was announced, I know I heard rumblings of a major suit of this nature by sight-impared people because they could not use a service provided by the gov't. Sure, it's still a long way before Joe Q's "WAY PAST K00L HOMEPAGE" is going to need to be site-impared accessible, but there's plenty of reason to make more commercial sites more accessible.

The best way for everyone on the Linux side to help is that the next time a site like Fox.com comes up where Linux users are shunned, email said site maintainers and point out it's not just Linux that is shunned, but anyone not using a "status quo" box. Sure, that might only be 5% of the potental viewing audience, but that's also 5% of potental customers. Point them to sites like www.websitesthatsuck.com which run down the bad tricks that should be avoided, and to www.w3c.org which have validators and other helpful information for writing clean HTML. And the key thing to remember is that it takes more work to make a web site less accessible than it does to make them fully accessible.