The Cola Comfort On The Web

So, those who have not taken the painful process of downloading Explorer 3.0 and Navigator 3.0 both are huge in size and a slow download takes hours feels a bit like an outcast. Who doesn't want on be on the, well, bleeding edge?

So, to cool off after a bout of lightning fast pointing and clicking, you come to rest on the Pepsi site at www.pepsi.com and what do you get? A very large image draws itself on the screen fast!

The very hep and trendy opening screen gleefully declares you have still a long way to go. The die-hard surfer is inevitably armed with Netscape plug-ins (third party programs that work in conjunction with the main program), but Pepsi wants much more out of your PC.

 

Get Explorer 3.0, Shockwave plug-in (to view better animations) and RealAudio (to listen to the music that's streaming in and you have the necessary muscle to traverse PepsiWorld.

Still not anywhere near enough. If travelling at speeds less than 28.8 kbps then jump on the Low Road. So, feel appropriately ashamed, (though VSNL can give you 28.8, the most you get nowadays is 19.2) and click on the Low Road.

You won't be disappointed even here, with only Netscape 2.0 for a vessel. The Low Road takes you to the Pepsiworld main page, where again, you have a full page of stunning graphics and animation. Even without any plug-ins, the animated .gif images make the page come alive.

From here, you travel to a lot of other pages, most of which have got nothing to do with the drink! You can listen to the music of your choice everything from blues to hard rock to techno and clippings from the latest movies.

Also, you have sections of the mind, body, soul and earth, with guides and articles. In the Chat section, you can leave e-mail messages or make live chat to others.

Ground reality We need PCs equipped with the latest hardware and software to make the most of the Web. That, in itself, is a damning prophecy for Scott McNealy's favourite project, the cheap Internet terminal. No browser upgrades, no hard disk... One can already visualise the $500 per unit price fly out the window.

Back to cooling off. At www.cocacola.com, you have a site that is much more sober. A bottle of Coke, and some lines on what Coke was doing at Atlanta. Outdated stuff hardly what you would expect from Coke. Compare it to the daily updated opening screen of Hotwired (www.hotwired.com) and one can't believe they have put outdated stuff on the Web.

We are not talking expensive business here, just common sense. However, the saving grace is the site's ease of use. The first-timer can get quite confused by the graphical jungle at Pepsiworld but Coca Cola presents you a convenient site-tree to navigate around the site. You can get at company financials, history, software (!) and queries. Both the sites have downloadable software, a sure-fire bet to attract surfers.

Even Coca Cola requires you to have additional software to see what the designers wanted you to see. But it does so in a less obtrusive way, so you don't feel technologically challenged.

But the site is, obviously, less visually appealing than Pepsi's and appeals to more mature audiences than the teenager Pepsi drowns its fizz on.

Meanwhile, if you want a better argument to download more plug-ins and viewers, check out the `Independence Day' website at www.id4.com. And despair. Like someone said, Let's see how many plug-ins Netscape will take before it bursts!