This makes sense when you combine a couple of factors of human nature. One is habit. We people are getting more and more used to instant gratification. Have thought, text message, post to Twitter. Get sudden urge to hear old 80s song again, search YouTube, listen to it. You get the picture. We’re surrounding ourselves by mobile devices of every shape, and it’s just training us to be less and less patient with lag.

The other factor is uncertainty. If you knew, every time, that no matter how long it takes, the page you want will eventually come up, you’d probably wait longer. But there’s so many things that could go wrong. Is it a bad connection? Server failed? Account suspended? Bad link? Too much Javascript slowing the page down? A Flash load? Webmaster mistake? We don’t know, but if it doesn’t come up in a few seconds, we know that we’ll get what we’re lookign for somewhere else.

Just one more reason to only host your site on a server running Linux (the fastest, most efficient system), and with a local web host so you cut out all the lag you can.

Peter Brittain

The thing that makes the boundary between web design and marketing so distinct is the kind of people each profession attracts. Marketers – the people who work in “sales” – are a different breed. They’re social, talkative, interactive, open, friendly, and persuasive. Web designers, on the other hand, spend all of their time working with machines and designing abstract things like software and graphics on them. So they’re likely to be introverted, intellectual, solitary, analytical, and strong on communications but weak on personality skills.

It terms of the Myer-Briggs personality types, engineers and artists are often (I)ntroverted, i(N)tuitive, (T)hinking, and (J)udgmental, while sales-staff and human-resource types tend to be (E)xtraverted, (S)ensing, (F)eeling, and (P)erceiving. The two personality types tend to clash. The manager’s job is to try to make everybody get along and work towards a common company goal.

Perhaps companies could do something to help these two tribes see eye-to-eye. Maybe they could have “take somebody from the other department to lunch” day! Perhaps, along with the new “eXtreme Programming” meme going around, we could assign web design teams composed of half-engineer and half-marketer. They each sit down and see what the other one does, and do the designing together.

Wouldn’t that be a nice world? But at the same time, we should cherish each type. If everyone was equally good at design and marketing, then nobody would be highly skilled in either one. There just doesn’t seem to be enough room in one human brain to cram in all of the learning needed to deal expertly with both people and computers. So we have to keep the two fields separate, while seeking to find a common ground between them.

Peter Brittain