Twirling vigorously, Sutherland Lyall dances round the cyber maypole.

Talking heads 

Mugshots. Now I've seen everything. Admittedly its only three blokes, all directors of the Belgian practice Styfhals & Partners, at www.styfhalspartners.be, but when you click on their page their upper torsos remain fixed while their heads follow your cursor around the screen--actually up, down, sideways, left, right, and straight ahead. But here's the thing: there is a strong tendency for all three heads to move in the same direction. There is a slightly lesser tendency for two to move together. And, and this is the killer, there is a faint chance that you can get the three heads looking in different directions. As I imagine their staff does in slack moments, I spent hours before I could get Roger Styfals beaming straight ahead, Bart Doms looking quizzically up to the left and Luc de Hovre glancing off to the other side. Bliss. Although you would like a little reward in, say, the form of old Rog singing a ditty about, say, Corb swimming off Cap Martin. How all this helps to woo potential clients is beyond me, but, hey, who cares when there's fun to be had.

Mysteries of navigation

The Styfhals site is otherwise really interesting because of its apparently vestigial help with navigation. I normally can't stand sites which are so perfect and important that you are very lucky to be allowed to intuit the means of getting around them. But there is nothing pompous about this site except, perhaps, the opening page which puts up, one by one, a series of words which you are probably expected to associate with the practice. Happily this is optional. When you click on 'skip' you get a bit of graphic business and a sound and then a whoosh and up comes the customary and eminently serviceable menu with 'home', 'projects', 'the office' and so on. You click on 'projects' and with another whoosh and a bit of a delay up slides a vertical row of grey squares. You click on a random square (not the third from the top which doesn't work) and there on the right is a thumbnail and a plan with arrows indicating where the photos were taken.

Click on one of these and up comes a bigger image which you can zoom and also read the bare details of the scheme--not so happily superimposed over the image. Click on one of the bigger grey squares at top or bottom and back you go. It's a bit more complicated than that but even a Jeremiah like this correspondent worked it out more or less instantly.

Clicks and whooshes are a big help--probably because they confirm that you had made an input and possibly because they make you feel that you have been allowed to make an input and are therefore included. The use of blank grey squares instead of names for each of the projects works because there aren't all that many of them and because I doubt very much whether potential clients ever have a clue about the names of your projects. Or are particularly interested. Now don't all go wiping out those useful headings and links on your site. Also remember that you are being privileged when people view your site. Not the other way about.

For the Styfhals site, I'm indebted, as I frequently am, to the indefatigable Eric Morehouse and his wonderful weekly blog, Eyecandy, at http://eyecandy-webcandy.blogspot.com.

Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow

The acid test of who a website proprietor imagines is privileged in the website-surfer transaction, is whether or not they use cutesy clocks, bloating bars and wait-a-moment caterpillars. I was asked to take a peek at www.davidwoodhouse.com, and there in the top left is a loading bar which later announces that it is building the interface. Then up come a bunch of black rectangles of different sizes with codes such as BOX-04 and BAL-05. You give the site the benefit of the doubt and sit there stupidly waiting for something to happen. Er, a light goes on in the brain and you roll the mouse. The black DIV-96 box transforms into the plan of the Divine Word Chapel. Then you wait. And wait. Must be something about the long electronic journey along that underwater Atlantic cable. After a minute or two I didn't wait.

Wrong side of the tracks

I know it looks really helpful but I can't understand why architects put maps on their websites showing people how to get to their offices. I know clients are not all plutocrats in chauffeur-driven cars with big cigars but they aren't often users of public transport--any more than they are lycra-clad bikies, which are the only two groups I can think of who might find such maps useful. JCMT Architects is a case in point at www.jcmt.co.uk. Here, the map anyway works against them in address-conscious London because although they are based in Highgate Studios on Highgate Road, the map shows that it's actually more Kentish Town, not the posh district half a mile away up the hill. I don't much care for the '60s colours or the tiny unadjustable type or more of those little 'loading' bars as you open a new page. They normally signify a need to change to faster web design consultants. But navigation is simple and unambiguous. And the site has brief, helpful captions which you can often expand--rather than the usual long boring texts.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]