The Internet is, primarily, a medium for communication. However, it seems to me that the designers of many Web pages have been seduced by the technology to such an extent that they have forgotten the basic principles. The most important thing about any communication medium is its content and not its design. Oh, yes, design is important; but it should be there to enhance the content, not to be an end in itself.

How many times have you visited a page rendered virtually unreadable by a "noisy" background that all but obliterates the text? Or been distracted by the antics of a superfluity of hyperactive, animated images? Or become lost in a labyrinth of frames and frames-within-frames that prevent you ever returning to exactly the same page that you only left moments before? What the creators of these pages forget is that Hypertext is about text - about the transmission of ideas - though I suspect that all these visual pyrotechnics exist simply to disguise the lack of any serious content at all.

My intention in creating this web site is to illustrate that web pages can be informative, interesting and remain at the cutting edge of Web development without the need to resort to "gimmicks".

Incidentally, please don't get the impression that I am some sort of Luddite, nostalgic for the scratch of goose quill on parchment. I welcome all the new technologies, and look forward to exploring the future technologies that haven't been invented yet. However, I also believe in using the right tools for the job; and if a High Bandwidth multimedia spectacular is not required for the job in hand, then we, as responsible web designers, should not use it.

Nor is this the start of some kind of campaign for a return to "pure web design" or "pure code" either. There is no need for a campaign because I know that as soon as the novelty of the new toys wears off, then the vast majority of web designers will rediscover the benefits of Good Design.

Unfortunately, by that time, there will be a new batch of Internet tools to contend with. 3D-modelling and Virtual Reality across the net are just round the corner. Just think of all the Bandwidth that's going to gobble up...