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October 11, 1996

New Tools for Home-Brew Home Pages
SILICON BEACH / By CAROL A. TROY

HOLLYWOOD -- The personal home page is becoming a ubiquitous fixture in American culture, a signature as "you" as set of "Born 2 Byte" license plates. Last year, digital chic was defined by a respectable e-mail address on your business card. This year, it's your little corner of the World Wide Web.


MetaTools offers the everyman the tools to be an artist on the web.
Maybe it's a girl thing. But when I build my home page, I want it to be well decorated, not like those blocky pastel billboards that clutter the Web.

Fortunately, a slew of new software makes it possible to do it yourself in style, without hiring a $100,000-a-job design company like Crashsite, Razorfish or W3-Design. A host of dynamic new tools allow you to mix animation, video, text and photos with interactive and even 3-D elements.

Further encouraging home-brew Web pages was the recent dual release of Netscape Navigator 3.0 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 -- both complemented with new Web-page design tools. Factor in the free hosting services being widely offered by battling Internet service providers, and the result is a lot of bad art going up in cyberspace.

Site construction is getting downright easy. Just months ago, it was necessary to learn hypertext markup language, or html, before sitting down to concoct a home page. While easier than learning a programming language, html was still designed by programmers -- and it shows. Only people who love differential equations and cryptography would really call it easy.

Today the Web itself is still slow at 14.4 or 28.8 Kbps, but the evolution of tools for designing Web pages zips along. The current generation of software actually writes the html for you. This summer, "Internet World" chose Adobe's PageMill ($98) as the best of these hand holders for the non-digerati, and even orthodox webheads are beginning to take note.

The navigation bar from Entropy8.com.

The proof was evident at the seventh annual Mac Summit at the University of California, Santa Barbara in July, organized by Guy Kawasaki, Apple's software evangelist from 1983 to 1987 and now an Apple Fellow, as a showplace of sizzling new tools for Web site designers (a reprise is scheduled at the University of Texas Nov. 13-16 in Austin).

Kai Krause -- the graphics guru behind Kai's Power Tools and MetaTools -- drove over from Montecito to preach the message of everyman-as-artist. Krause, who began giving his code away for free in 1977, took MetaTools public last year, proving you can still get rich starting a business in a garage. Dressed in cowboy boots, black shirt and black pants, Krause threw morphs from his $50 Goo program up on the screen, drawing gasps of delight from the audience. This image-liquidity stuff had never been done before. It's the sort of virgin snow this long-haired visionary prefers to stomp around in.

After two days of screen-staring at Santa Barbara, I felt dropped-and-dragged through a virtual reality version of Wired magazine. The neon brights, silver shimmers and fractal expanses of the Mac Summit were like a primer on chaos theory. For good or bad, this may well have been glimpse at our digital future.

But whatever your taste, the lesson learned in Santa Barbara was that you don't need algebra or algorithms to strut your stuff: just buy the software and start playing. Many of these applications can be used, if not really understood, right out of the box by nonprofessionals.

Exciting plug-ins help amateur Web designers (that's just about all of us) take advantage of the fluid nature of the Web to create living, breathing spaces.

Adobe PageMaker 6.0, for example, offers a new feature: screen-size pages at 640 by 460 pixels. "I just put in pixels instead of points," explains Adobe's Web Mistress, Laura Perry (one of the only 8 percent of presenters at the Santa Barbara who were women). "Just drag and drop the Web links onto your home page."

Some of the more complex Web technologies buzzing around Santa Barbara included Shockwave for multimedia, animated and interactive displays (click on something and make it wiggle); RealAudio for streaming audio; and Sun's Java, used by real programmers to create "applets" for anything from animation to number crunching.

Netizens who don't want their home pages to resemble the static screens of the movie War Games can spin a new language with Krause's 3-D Bryce terrain program. Transform a photo of your cat's head into a 3-D Pacific atoll and fly right over it.

Manabu Inada, art director of MTV Interactive, prowls the Web for hot sites that sport "Java and Shockwave and cool design." His recent favorites? Entropy8.com and Crashsite.com. An MIT Media Lab provenance is detectable in Razorfish.com (click on the Blue Dot for a bibliography, free type fonts from Emigre magazine, and Yale's WWW design primer).


The creative fallout from the Microsoft move against Netscape is still shaking out. The Java vs. ActiveX debate rages between Sun and Microsoft. But as of the Santa Barbara get-together, Java was the experts' heads-on favorite because of its multi-platform nature.

The newest "endless frontier," writes the CyberTimes columnist Ashley Dunn, "is interconnectivity." But can home-brew designers keep up with all new releases when even the pros are struggling to stay current?

"Everything moves in dog years," says Jim Evans, design director of Crashsite, a Santa Monica firm that zeroes in on entertainment clients. "Every morning there's a new software to learn. Freehand. StrataPro. Shockwave. Java. VRML [virtual reality markup language] programmers."

Since you're never going to catch up with all this, there's no sense in procrastinating. With all the potent tools at your disposal, it's time to create a new Web page or beat your old one into submission. Grab some Goo, add a chunk of PageMill, and you've decorated your virtual room on the Web.

Next month, of course, you'll want to supercharge your page with a "channel" using Marimba's new Castanet transmitter and receiver software.

"A channel - that's what we call it," explained Marimba's president, Kim Polese, "because they run outside the browser, so the World Wide Wait will be faster."

And frogs will fly?

Related Sites
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser's "Back" button or icon until this page reappears. Sites Recommended for Design Excellence


Netscape and Internet Explorer users can take an guided web tour of sites recommended for design excellence.

Start the tour.
Recommended by Magabu Inada, MTV art director:

Recommended by Razorfish Design:

Recommended by W3-Design:

Recommended by Crashsite:

Recommended Books

To learn the basics, read Jennifer Niederst, who designed the very first .com site back in 1994 (Global Network Navigator, or GNN) and has written an attractive, clear manual, Designing for the Web (O'Reilly, April 1996, $24.95).

Designing Web Graphics is a full-color, step-by-step guide to successful methods for designing graphics for Web delivery, written in plain English. The CD-ROM includes html templates, tutorial files and graphics-related helper applications. (New Riders Pub, January 1996, $50). It can be ordered at the Web site and is available in bookstores.

The hottest digital graphics magazine is Design Graphics, published in Australia. Check it out for lush effects.



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