A great article on the similarities and differences of the medium of the web to the medium of print can be found on A List Apart called The Dao of Web Design.
Here is an excerpt:
The web is a new medium, although it has emerged from the medium of printing, whose skills, design language and conventions strongly influence it. Yet it is often too shaped by that from which it sprang. “Killer Web Sites” are usually those which tame the wildness of the web, constraining pages as if they were made of paper – Desktop Publishing for the Web. This conservatism is natural, “closely held beliefs are not easily released”, but it is time to move on, to embrace the web as its own medium. It’s time to throw out the rituals of the printed page, and to engage the medium of the web and its own nature.
This is not for a moment to say we should abandon the wisdom of hundreds of years of printing and thousands of years of writing. But we need to understand which of these lessons are appropriate for the web, and which mere rituals.
The article proposes that web design is a very different beast to print design due to the inherently flexible nature of the web environment. Since its publication in 2000, many different devices are now used to connect to the same web content (and systems) and the key strength of the inherent flexibility that the web offers is often constrained by using outdated print design techniques.
Although this article is levelled at the web and print design communities, and one whose content we strongly endorse, there is one area that is not discussed - web/print agencies’ clients.
It is our view that, as much as we should adopt the flexibility of the web, when designing a web site/application for a client we also need to consider the level of knowledge that the client has regarding the web - do they see it in print (or fixed) terms, or do they see the flexibility and possibilities? Further, we also need to consider the impact on the clients’ brands - which are usually constrained to ensure consistency. And let’s not also forget the client’s customers … what do they expect?
The reality is that it’s a juggling act of differing priorites, each of which needs to be managed and addressed during the web design and development process. It is not simply a case of throwing out the old and embracing the new (flexibility). Often we need to consider how different systems (e.g. pocket PCs, network devices, etc) may be used to access the same content and structure how this can be achieved. Fortunately, current web standard that promote the separation of presentation, content and funtionality provide the foundations for this - we just need to ensure we include and balance all the priorities in the process.