Designing A Design Tool
By Michael Floyd
Here's a hot tip to make a cool million. Create a design tool that supports all of Web-site design, not just page design, and then stop! Want proof? Consider a recent survey by Los Angeles-based market-research firm Jaffe and Soeder, which found that while there are a number of site-design software packages on the market, there is no clear choice among Webmasters, professional site designers, or content creators. In fact, Jaffe and Soeder discovered that many still hand-code their HTML in good old-fashioned text editors, and concluded that "nobody has really attacked this market properly."
Interestingly, even the summary report focuses on page design. Indeed, many of the so-called design packages we see at the magazine are better termed "Web-authoring" software — HTML editors that include a suite of tools for creating image maps, GIF animations, and the like. More sophisticated tools like NetObjects' Fusion take the next step by offering a drag-and-drop page-design environment, resource viewers, and project-management features.
And herein lies the rub. By making the leap from a page designer to a project-management scheme, these products also move away from design and toward implementation, thus potentially infringing on members of the development team: graphic designers, site architects, content creators, applet programmers, and Webmasters.
Of course, high-end products provide groupware features that allow team members to collaborate. But these packages suffer from other ailments: They don't allow you to use additional tools; they don't allow you to leverage work performed on an existing site; and they're very, very expensive.<>
