Have you ever visited a website called Headline History (www.headlinehistory.co.uk), where children become reporters on virtual newspapers set in various historical periods? Pupils find their own news stories by following leads to bona fide sources and interacting with video clips of witnesses, learning about real events in the process.
It meets all the national-curriculum criteria for its target group, and there is no more difficult an audience anywhere than a hyperactive tween. Interactive features are a key tool in the challenging task of capturing their attention and holding it. This site does both so well, it won a Bafta award from the media professionals. Grown-up sites, please note.
Children's websites set the standard for design and accessibility, claims Beth Porter, a judge of the American Webby awards - the internet equivalent of the Oscars. When she told a UK think-tank as much, it was time for the industry to sit up. Porter, author of The Net Effect, was contributing to the digital manifesto of the Institute for Public Policy Research (www.ippr.org.uk),and feels passionately that sites for grown-ups have much to learn from kids.
"It has always struck me how much more innovative and creative sites for children are," she said. "Whenever I say this, however, I come up against brands and corporations that don't seem to have the imagination to change things, even though they are spending money on the most prestigious sites."
Interactivity - or the lack of it - is her pet grouse. Interactivity is the unique asset that distinguishes the web from other media, yet many websites do not take advantage of it, preferring to rely on uninspiring text-based design instead. With a little investment, for instance, in voice-based presentation and immersive multimedia, all could be so different.
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"It's amazing how the designers of the best children's destinations have created truly accessible pages, hubbed around speech technology, without sacrificing interactivity," she says.
CBBC Newsround has one of the UK's 10 most popular children's websites, and its Quick Guide tool, providing context and background for the stories it features, garnered so much positive feedback - much of it from adults - that BBC News has adopted the concept for its main site. "They've produced about 12 guides, including one on GM crops and one on Al-Qaeda," says Rebecca Shallcross, interactive executive for CBBC.
Perhaps it is no surprise that kids lead the way. Today's teenagers are the first generation to have grown up with the internet, and it has changed both their behaviour and the way they interact.
"When I was a teenager, girls would go to school, come home and spend hours on the phone to their friends," says Robert Cooper, 30, producer of Jamie Kane, the BBC's new alternative-reality game for teenagers. "My sister was always arguing with my dad about it. Now, they go out on a Saturday afternoon with their friends, come home and write a blog about who said what to whom, then read each others' blogs. It takes a huge amount of creative effort to keep it up to date, and have the best content, but kids know that and are willing to do it."
Some sites for adults have picked up on this trend. "The site we did for Jamie Oliver (www.jamieoliver.net) was the first commercial corporate site to apply blogging technology," says Peter Beech, one of the partners at the award winning web-design company Poke. "We realised he was up for the idea and would make regular contributions, and his input has real interest. But many brands and companies run away from the idea because they are frightened of having a real dialogue with real people."
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Other lessons have been learnt as well. Although Ikea (www.ikea.com) still cannot manage online shopping, it has understood that basic information can be conveyed in many interesting ways.
Instead of text-based FAQs, its customer-service section has a "chatbot" called Anna to answer your queries. You type questions into a box and, with simple artificial intelligence, Anna (who could pass for Agnetha from Abba) understands enough keywords to answer basic questions.
"It introduces a bit of playfulness," Cooper says. "If you try to chat her up, she even has a few put-downs." Ask her out and you'll find she has fended off unwelcome suitors before. "I don't really want to talk about personal issues like marriage," she writes back. "If you could talk to me about Ikea, that would be much better."
Absolut Vodka (www.absolut.com/raspberrioveriew) has also understood that the desire to have fun online doesn't end when people grow up. At its site, you can tweak its advertisement by adjusting the lighting until the fuse-box graphic starts smoking. You can also get out the spray paints and run riot with colour.
It's much the same concept as that adopted by other kids' sites, including the Art Machine at the delightful www.cbc.ca/kidscbc, part of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Meanwhile, at CBBC, Shallcross says there are five design principles that could apply to any site.
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"Rule one: we always user-test our ideas, which is crucial to the success of the BBC's children's sites. Children always surprise you, and we rely on them for feedback. Two, navigation has to be clear. Unless they know what they are going to get when they go to a link, children won't click. Three, pages of text are a turn-off, so we're always thinking of new ways of offering content that involve participation. Four, it's important to create confidence, so if something takes a long time to download, you should say so."
Finally, Shallcross says, the BBC's children's sites try to follow an old adage: Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand. "That's what our design is all about, and those are good principles for anyone designing web pages."
Dull sites result not only from neglecting these rules, but from following other people's templates. Amazon's tab menu has been copied exhaustively, and EasyJet and British Airways employ a similar graphic user interface for choosing and booking flights – although neither is particularly good.
"In the early days, too many companies assumed a site was an electronic brochure," Porter says. "It's a real leap to understand that the whole experience of being online needs to be catered for. Part of the problem is that people commissioning sites don't understand the medium, and designers don't want to alienate clients." As a result, there is the whole question of whose agenda the site is following: the company's or the consumer's.
For example, look at the site of the global PR firm Edelman (www.edelman.com). Porter, who reviewed it for a possible Webby award, says: "It feels as if they wanted an online revamp, but could only be bothered to smarten up the home page." She explains that the company merely added a Flash movie showing unrelated still images, along with a clunky new navigation menu that "still leads to the same old inner pages of corporate hype".
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Compare this with the child-focused Headline History, or with Disney (www.disney.com), which is equally good, and you will see the difference. "It epitomises how technology meets fun, with the occasional lesson thrown in," Porter says. "What's important about this site is how so much of it requires real exploration. You have to go a long way to beat this."
However, Nasa has a good try. With the whole of space to play with, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that its designers create rather wonderful children's sites (see kids.msfc.nasa.gov). Even so, it comes as a pleasant surprise to discover that they are among the best destinations in the internet universe. Among the fun activities available here is firing a cannonball into orbit (and thereby understanding one of Newton's basic laws of physics), seeing what the moon and the stars look like through wavelengths we can't usually see (radio waves, infrared, x-rays and so on), and learning about the relationship between curved space and gravity.
This is learning at its most fun. If children are to find cyberspace as exciting when they grow up, there needs to be a change of emphasis. "The most important thing is to start with your audience in mind," says Anra Kennedy, head of learning at the 24 Hour Museum and editor of the cultural heritage portal's award-winning kids' section, Show Me (www.show.me.uk). "So I've tried to think about the child sitting at home or in a classroom, and brought to bear my experience as a parent and a teacher."
Selecting the best from other museum sites, it goes out of its way to tailor content to children, with carefully chosen themes, crystal-clear navigation and interactive games such as Hair Detective, which teaches elementary forensics.
There are great grown-up sites. The fashion designer Alexander McQueen's site (www.alexandermcqueen.com/flash.html) is a perfect example of making the design appropriate to its subject; and nobody could accuse the History Channel (www.thehistorychannel.co.uk/pastmaster/usa), which has an interactive quiz, of not involving visitors. But so many sites have not even begun to address what surfers might like, or how best to deliver their needs.
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"I don't believe many sites are getting what they could out of the internet, and that matters, because this technology is going to be running our lives," Kennedy concludes. "A whole generation is growing up that expects it to do so."
GOLDEN RULES FOR AN ENGAGING SITE
1 Involve the visitor. "Interactivity is the sine qua non of the internet" - Beth Porter, Webby judge
2 Road-test your website regularly with your audience. "Ability and the things people like are constantly changing" - Rebecca Shallcross, CBBC
3 Keep text to a minimum. "The web is one of the worst mediums for physically trying to read" - Beth Porter
4 "Create what is appropriate for the brand" - Peter Beech, Poke
5 Be playful "People don't stop wanting to have fun just because they are grown-up" - Rebecca Shallcross
6 Think about your target audience. "Many sites fail because they are trying to please everyone all the time" - Anra Kennedy of Show Me
7 Be inventive "Understand that there are different ways of presenting information - such as Ikea's chatbot" - Rob Cooper, BBC producer
8 Don't try to be too clever with navigation. "It should do what it says on the tin" - Rebecca Shallcross
9 Eliminate dead links. "Dead links are a killer. Children think it's broken and they click away" - Anra Kennedy
10 Borrow inspiration from kids' sites judiciously. "You look stupid if you're 40 and you're using an avatar (a customisable graphic identity) to express yourself" - Peter Beech