Every new business technology – the photocopier, the fax machine, the desktop PC, the cellphone, e-mail, the telephone, the typewriter – has a four-stage life-cycle: resistance, gradual acceptance, indispensability, and obsolescence.

The resistance stage is characterized by skepticism, hostility, and fear. In the second stage, a perceptual shift has occurred, and the new technology is viewed as the source of a competitive advantage. Progressive or adventurous companies invest in it while it’s still novel and expensive because they either recognize a way of capitalizing on it, or wish to project a forward-thinking public image. These trend-setters tend to get the ink in the business magazines, where their managers tend to be referred to as visionaries. A wave of general interest follows, leading to the third stage: wondering how we ever survived without it, and mocking the dinosaurs who still haven’t got with the program (“I can’t believe these people don’t have voice mail – it’s so … rude.”) Obsolescence follows (who uses actual answering machines anymore?), but the ghosts of old technologies persist. Typewriters made teletype machines possible, which made the fax conceivable; the IBM Selectric was a short hop to the PC keyboard; the fax machine is on its way out, but mainly because more and more people just fax directly from their computer desktop now.

There is an interesting corollary to the four stages of new business technologies: almost without exception, the new technology will be pursued, understood, adopted, and accepted from the bottom of the company up. The receptionist will understand the fax machine and the voice mail system long before the CEO, and the 23-year-old dweeb in the Information Systems department may be one of the few who will ever actually understand the company’s Local Area Network setup. And here’s the rub: this means that in most cases, the people who are least qualified to make decisions about new technologies are the ones with the final approvals.

The World Wide Web is a case in point.

The Web is a wonderful outlet for Kurt Cobain murder conspiracy theorists and people who can’t distinguish episodes of The X-Files from the evening news, and it helps keep all sorts of other anti-social basement dwellers harmlessly occupied. But as a business technology, it was both misunderstood and oversold. This led to a lot of ill-conceived sites – badly designed, confused, and unpromoted (the “billboard in the desert” syndrome). Understandably, there was some backlash when the promised payoff failed to materialize. But in the last year or so we have begun to understand the real-world limits and strengths of the medium, and the requirements for using it successfully; the technology is now on the cusp of indispensability.

One of the most influential people in this development is David Siegel, whose Creating Killer Web Sites probably did more to improve the deplorable state of web site design than any other book on the subject. His new book, Secrets of Successful Web Sites: Project Management on the World Wide Web, will probably be as influential because it addresses the knowledge gap between the decision-makers and the project managers, and provides a model for creating an effective, valuable business web site.

The book is divided into two sections: case studies of how excellent sites were created, and a textbook on general project management for web sites.

Part One looks at 15 commercial and non-commercial sites representing a wide range of client requirements, from Land Rover and Stolichnaya Vodka, to HIV In Site and Women’s Wire to Virgin Records, Salon Magazine, and Doonesbury. Two of the sites were done by Siegel’s own company, Studio Verso, which contributes to his credibility. The profiles read like short magazine articles, but in spite of the author’s attempts to find drama in the struggles (against deadlines, technical obstacles, or difficult clients), the results are less than compelling. However, they are valuable in two ways. They reveal the amount of work and the number of people required to create a really good web site; and the examples cover a broad enough range of styles and purposes that readers considering investing in a site or contractors looking to move into the big leagues will probably find examples here that will give them some idea of what they are getting into.

Part Two is the real meat of the book. Siegel first looks at the state of relations between client and contractor, and how they can work best together. He then goes into an in-depth four-phase description of the project: strategy and tactics; content development and design; production; and launch and maintenance. It’s dense, but well laid out and helpfully illustrated. And it has an attendant web site (of course). Readers who are in any way involved in purchasing or designing a commercial web site will easily justify paying the book’s hefty price, especially when one considers that the real cost of a good site can range from $20,000 at the low end to $1-million and beyond for all the bells and whistles.

For those with a limited budget and perhaps more personal aims, there is Teach Yourself Great Web Design in a Week by Anne-Rae Vasquez-Peterson and Paul Chow and The Non-Designer’s Web Book: An Easy Guide to Creating, Designing and Posting Your Own Web Site by Robin Williams and John Tollett. Any random surf will reveal that the Web is mostly an esthetic swamp. Not since the dawn of the desktop-published company newsletter has so much bad design been inflicted on so many by so many, so these two books should be welcome. They contain almost identical, solid technical content (browser-safe colour palettes, bandwidth concerns, animation tricks), and some similarities in their advice on avoiding common design errors (keep your navigation system clear and consistent, use white space, assume a 640 x 460 monitor resolution, etc.). Teach Yourself Web Design is laid out as a seven-day course, and it includes a CD-ROM with class materials and some shareware utilities and resources. The Non-Designer’s Web Book is more of a resource book that goes from the basic concepts to more complex issues. Both obviously have a mandate to be non-threatening.

In the case of Teach Yourself, this has translated into a licence for using an annoying, breezy tone. Maybe I just have an irrational dislike of any book that – for any reason, at any time – instructs me to “stay tuned.” But I could be more forgiving of the tone if the authors’ running series of made-up examples were not themselves so utterly lame – as ugly and witless as their prose. This is unfortunate, because the book is perfectly solid on the technical side; for example, it has a clever section on making seamless background patterns. Also, it has a useful appendix of design-related web site resources (which includes Siegel’s Killer Sites page).

The Non-Designer’s Web Book is better designed, which simply makes one more confident in its authority. One of the strengths of the design is that it presents the information in a non-threatening way without being condescending. Each topic comes in an easily digestible chunk (usually a single page), and each builds nicely on the one previous. The book makes extensive use of illustrations from real sites, and its mock sites are much better than those in Teach Yourself. The quiz sections at the end of each chapter are a bit chintzy, but admittedly helpful for quickly identifying the gaps in one’s knowledge. And at $30 less than Teach Yourself, the CD-ROM won’t be missed.

The Web is an infant medium that is changing so fast it may be obsolete before it has a chance to mature; nevertheless it has transformed the way we conceive information design. In their own ways, Secrets of Successful Web Sites and The Non-Designer’s Web Book contribute to this on-going transformation. With the best intentions, Teach Yourself Great Web Design does not.