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Your support makes all the difference.I will get around to other letters of the alphabet, promise, but I'm drawn back to revisit the letter S by the news that ShiftControl (http://www.shiftcontrol. com), the professionally produced, Guardian-backed webzine covering culture, arts and entertainment, has already had its first makeover. And very smart it is, too. I find Mk2 easier to get to grips with than Mk1, and it is at least as stylish.
But if, as they say, this is just the first of many frequent redesigns, you have to ask what that says about the Web community's view of design. Web sites, like other products, have to be designed to work as well as look striking, and perpetual novelty is more likely to get in the way of communication than to aid it. However, at this stage of the Web game, experimentation is a great way to find out what works and what doesn't.
The content of ShiftControl is growing on me, though it's still not something I would pay to see. The Plug 'n' Play "magazine section"usually has some stimulating stuff - though I'm not sure where blind taste-testing of cigarettes fits into the editorial remit. For Web freaks like me, it's the Wild About the Net section that is most compelling. This week, you could do a multiple-choice quiz to get your musical tastes rated for wildness, earning you links to appropriate music sites.
My initial honest response earned me an entirely accurate rating of "musically challenged"; by judicious lying, I was able to up my rating to "demi-crazy", and so get links including SonicNet (http://www.sonicnet.com). This extensive and brash American site is almost entirely unintelligible to me, so it's quite possibly cutting-edge stuff.
I'm not sure what response would have secured me a link to Select (http://www.erack. com/select/selecthome. htm) - a stylish and efficient music site derived from a paper magazine, with a good mix of features, news and reference material, including quite a long list of album reviews. When I looked in, you could vote on whether Patsy Kensit should end up in heaven or hell - something to do with someone called Liam?
I didn't discover any actual, audible music on either of these sites. But there's plenty of it in the enthusiastically constructed online edition of St Mary the Virgin Parish News (http://www2.wildnet.co. uk/pedwards/). It also has more animations than Disney, wild background textures - you name it.
It's nightmarish to look at, but the content shows how this global medium can be put to highly local, specific use. The site includes details of upcoming parish events (time to take down the 5 October jumble sale, I think), the text of recent sermons and comprehensive links to other Christian sites. When it includes a virtual reality church, it'll be virtually unnecessary to go anywhere near the place
Chris Gill
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