Word.com, a popular webzine is perhaps one of the first high profile victims of the overuse of cutting edge technologies in current web design. Yoshi Sodeoka, the art director of word.com has recently published a "Letter From The Art Director" which has gained huge feedback and reaction from not just the web design community but also the fans of the Word.com website.

With the growing view among many web users that web designers are designing websites aimed more at themselves than their clients or their clients customers, Yoshi Sodeoka is the first high profile designer to realise the benefits of accessibility and usability.

In his letter he states "For 5 years now word.com has been producing dynamic content where design and the latest web technologies that influence design and layout from DHTML to flash to cascading stylesheets sto java have been used. This has however taken a toll on the users of the site that are not as up to speed as Yoshi and his editors in viewing this content, with the result that over the years word.com as well as garnering praise for its cutting edge sensibilities has also garnered contempt for crashing browsers, usability and speed." With this Yoshi plan to make Word.com more accessible and user friendy.

In many respects this is a perfect mirror of the state of affairs in the growing number of websites currently utilizing these technologies with no time given to the demands of the user themselves. Corporate product websites claim "this website works best in navigator 5" "Please enable java to view website", "flash 4 required to view this website", "you need shockwave to view this website" etc., and it is becoming increasingly astonishing that companies selling their wares honestly expect the user to download all the latest web technologies to view what may amount to a powerpoint style marketing presentation of how great their brand is or a flash animation of zinging text animations full of marketing buzz words, when all the customer wanted was to view the product, check out the prices or possibly make an order.

And whereas the web design firms continue to extol the virtues of these technologies, the clients themselves are slowly coming to realise as the complaints mount up and the bad press circulates about their website, that the webdesign firms are not looking after their clients best needs, but looking after their own. It's a case of the client fitting in with the designers whims rather than the other way around.

Yoshi Sodeoka however is one of of the first of no doubt many web designers and art directors who have come to realise that enough is enough, and what users really need is accessible, usable websites, and that his role as an art director is to facilitate this.

Writing recently in the webzine A List Apart, Jeffrey Zeldman sees that "The web is not software, not print, not television, yet it can function in ways similar to these media, and the way it functions depends largely on who it is for. It's a question of audience, or if you prefer, a question of audience model. Are you designing for users, readers, or viewers?"

If web designers are to continue to play a significant role in the shaping of the internet and the way it is used they clearly need to balance their innate emphasis on the purely visual and accept not just the functional and textual importance of the web but its accessibility and usability also.

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