*** From the Archives ***

This article is from February 28, 2000, and is no longer current.

Eye on the Web

2

Yesterday found me in a quandary over what my inaugural column on Web design should cover. Should I examine different approaches to navigation? Sites that effectively use animation and streaming media? Or perhaps the burgeoning importance of written content on the Web? Luckily, I listen to the radio while I work, and that’s where I found the answer.
During a break from a thirty minute set of easy listening music (“lite rock, less talk”), the announcer came on the air to tell me what I had secretly suspected, that, JenniferLopez.com is the hottest site on the Web. Never mind that Yahoo! gets more hits. Never mind that media juggernaut AOL Time Warner, the 800-pound gorilla of Web content, had nothing to do with the site. Indeed, never mind that the announcer didn’t cite a source for her data. Jennifer Lopez’ Web site is the hottest and that’s that.
With this windfall of information I had something to write about: what makes a Web site hot. I pointed my browser to www.jenniferlopez.com, ready for the heady onslaught of design revelations and paradigm shifts. Darn! I didn’t have the latest version of the Flash plug-in, which was required to view the site. Though the impending download might have been off-putting to the legions of Web surfers who still have dial-up Internet connections, I quickly downloaded and installed the necessary software thanks to my handy DSL connection.
I was able to log onto JenniferLopez.com on my second try. It’s a good-looking site to be sure. And it does have a healthy does of Jennifer’s photos, which go a long way towards making it the hottest site on the Web. It’s definitely not its efficient use of desktop space. Though Jennifer’s site appears in its own small window, sans status and toolbars, a larger window with nothing but a brown background and the title of Jennifer’s hit album, On the 6, persists in the background.
Aside from this relatively meaningless use of space, the folks who designed the site, Kioken Design, a Japanese company with offices in New York (and who, incidentally, also did PuffDaddy.com, the site for Jennifer’s beau Sean “Puffy” Combs), did a bang-up job of making it an aesthetically pleasing place to visit. Of course, the site is devoted to Jennifer Lopez, so they had an advantage.
The small window and animated design elements on Jennifer’s site (a series of lines that dance across the page) bear a resemblance to a whole slew of Flash-heavy sites on the Web today. These sites seem to be trying to approximate the television experience, where things move around in a small window without obvious controls that you can click and manipulate. But this resemblance to TV, and to other sites on the Web, is still not what makes JenniferLopez.com so darned hot.
Nor is it the site’s navigation. Say you want to check out Jennifer’s photo gallery (and who wouldn’t?). You can choose a photo session and click on thumbnails of images to get the blown-up Jennifer, but you still have to go back to the original photo page to get to any other pictures from that shoot, making for a lot of extra clicks. Everyone knows what a pain extra clicks can be when you’ve got a slow connection.
Say you want to check out the sites for movies and television shows Jennifer’s been in (she was one of the original fly girls, after all). You’d be out of luck, as I was when I tried time after time to click on these apparently broken links. So, we can be safe in saying that the preponderance of links are not what makes JenniferLopez.com the hottest site on the Web.
But, luckily for Jennifer, her site is the hottest site on the Web, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why. The answer is Jennifer Lopez herself. In the still developing online medium, which doesn’t yet have any big names of its own (even its awards show, the Webbies, has to hire paparazzi to harass its nominees), star power is where it’s at. Unfortunately for all of you Web designers, this means that no matter how pristinely designed your site is, how small the download time, how appealing your aesthetics, your site will not automatically be the hottest site on the Web.
This doesn’t mean you can’t try. Although no one is complaining about looking at Jennifer Lopez on the Web (and especially not that chest-baring, gravity-defying number she wore to last week’s Grammies), what the medium really needs is star power of its own. And this star power needs to spring from experts in Web design, not experts in film acting, or pop singing. With continued attention to design, new forms of interactivity, and a few more strides towards the ever-elusive broadband future, more of us may yet get a chance to be as hot as Jennifer Lopez.
 

  • anonymous says:

    I went to look at JenniferLopez.com on a G4 PowerMac, and it looks like hell. The fixed window size chops off content near the bottom of the window that can’t be scrolled to view. Text is wrapping strangely in other windows which requires long horizontal scrolling to read it all. The pop-up ads that appear upon each click through the confusing interface are annoying. And popping up even more new windows on certain clicks within the site turns your desktop into a cluttered mess. This is only after being there for 45 seconds and clicking on a few links.

    Once again “gee-whiz” value has taken precedence over design and functionality. It makes this site a prime example of bad interface design, bad info architecture and poor graphic design. She’s lucky she’s famous, cause this site won’t win her any awards.

  • anonymous says:

    Makes sense to me!

  • >