Much of this tutorial will be based on case studies from designs

Much of this tutorial will be based on case studies from designs if two sites for sun microsystems: the external one (www.sun.com) that is freely available on the internet and an internal one that isonly accesible to employees.

Fundamental desing concepts
We dont believe that you can succeed on the WWW just by putting some cool stuff out there, Doing so might have been enough when the webwas young (way back in 1993): I remember visiting the excited about the Australian bird songs. Now, who neeeds another WEBsite? People are suffocating from information overload, so WWW designers have tobecome much more user-oriented and provide value added information to attract traficc to their server.

We decided the provide vlue added information in the form of a monthley magazine cover anteto be highly selective in choosing a small number of cover stories. Some people dont understand the value of less is more, but if everythning is highlighted, then nothing has prominence. I estimatethat it costs the word economy about hafl a million dollars in lost user productivity every time we nadd one more desing element to suns home page. It ie the responsibility every time we add one moredesing element to Suns home page, It is the responsibility of the web editor to prioritize the information space for the user and to point out a very small number of recommended information objects. Thebeaty of hypertext is that the user can then browse the information space futher and dive deeper into the specific informatión of interest to that individual user.

Three major findings from ourextensive usability studies were:

People have very little patience for poorly desingned WWW sites. As one user put it: "the more well-organizad a page is, the more faith i will in to the info." Manyother users told us that they would be out of a server, never to return, if they got too many server errors or "under construction" signs (a user: "either the information in there or it is not;...