About the Site

March 5, 1998

'Delta'? Well, a delta is the place where a river meets the sea, and breaks into dozens or hundreds of little streams. I thought it appropriate, in a metaphorical way. Also, Delta is for change. And the slightly techie feel the word has doesn't hurt.

If the layout of the home page looks familiar, you've probably seen Star Trek. They are based on the work of Mike Okuda, a graphics artist working for Paramout and responsible for the 'look' of all the Star Trek shows. Whatever you think of the shows themselves, Okuda's work stands as an example of a simple and clean user interface, presenting multiple options in a dense but easily understandable format. These kinds of designs are called 'Okudagrams'. Look back here for a Cardassian interface some time early next millennium.

One of my convictions is that the best web pages are born from restrictions, rather than freedom. I've tried designing many web pages for myself over time, and none of them looked as good as the sites I was building for clients. Eventually, I decided that I had too much freedom, and was trying to do too many cool things with not enough bandwidth, and of course the result was an eye-watering mess.

These pages are restricted by a couple of very simple rules: Black on white except for links, graceful degradation, nothing fancier than tables, and as much as possible accessible straight from the home page.

As soon as I imposed these restrictions, the ideas came crowding in. It became "How can I make the best pages given these limits".

Another consideration was download speed. Nothing here is more important than speed. I want something readable on the screen with the first packet down the link. Hear this: Waiting for the entire page to load, graphics and all before seeing even a single word is unbearable.

Also, making sure I built a site that, in my laziness, was easy to maintain was important. Masterful .gif works of art for each link are nice, but impossible to keep consistent if you keep throwing up content. (content vomiting is more common than you think. Most personal pages are the handiwork of very sick people :-)

Which leads to my last and most deeply held conviction: That pages need to have content. Even if it's just an ego trip, it needs to be about your ego trip, what makes it different, how to have one of my own, and all the rest. If you're going to put 'stuff' up, make sure it's original stuff, otherwise a simple link to the existing content will suffice.

In order to contradict my previous paragraph, I'll also say that if you find outstanding content of a timeless and eternal nature, make a copy. The Web is now a cultural filter, helping us find and preserve that which we value most. Use it wisely. Use it well.