Jason Knight

The less code you use, the less there is to break

Nov 18, 2017

Generally the things you listed -- animations, effects, and shiny -- are the antithesis of "best". It's goofy garbage done by artsy types to cover up for a lack of content of value, or by marketing types who don't know enough about the Internet to even tell anyone what should or should not be on a website. It's most always rooted in a "flash over substance, form over functionality" mentality that at the end of the day ends up little more than dumping a can of shellac on a pile; in other words, somebody is polishing a turd.

Such sites failings are only exacerbated by how shoddily coded they usually are, how agonizingly slow they are to load, and that most always they are inaccessible non-semantic gibberish telling large swaths of users to go **** themselves!

See the garbage at places like awwwards, csswinner, and so forth where as pretty and fancy as those sites are, they are universally slow loading poorly coded train wreck laundry lists of how NOT to build a website,

There's a reason I hold up sites like Hashnode, Google, Facebook, and Craigslist as the bleeding edge of PROPER design... where what's REALLY important -- the CONTENT -- takes precedence over some artists spanking it on the screen to try and cover up for a lack of it.

Whilst I go to Awwwards and I would give a 0 rating to damned near every site they feature on usability and accessibility grounds. Particularly when they can't even be properly responsive, have legible colour contrasts, elastic design, or meet even the SIMPLEST of WCAG minimums.

People don't visit websites for the goofy crap you hang around the content, they visit FOR the content. Anything that distracts from or gets in the way of getting to that content is a waste of time, effort, and pisses on usability and accessibility from so on high you'd think the almighty just got back from a kegger.

Aakash Mallik

S/W Engineer @ Samsung R&D Delhi

Nov 18, 2017

Alright, I will be honest with you - I was pissed off by the type of language and tone of your comment and the way you easily denounce artists but the last paragraph really got me... Yeah you are actually right, people don't visit our web apps for the looks, but for the content they provide. Ex- 4chan, redit, etc.

Aakash Mallik My tone is mostly fueled by seeing project after project TANKED by the fancy stuff. It's part of what permanently keeps sites like Dailymotion listed as "also ran" compared to Youtube. It's what made Ask Jeeves / Jeeves / Ask / stop changing your name or it'll run you out of business go bits-up face-down against the clean simplicity of Google. It's part of why the only reason Bing has traffic is it's the default on new Windows installs.

BING is a STUNNING example of what I mean. Slow loading massive background image too large to have any business on a website, multiple images at the bottom before I've even said what I'm looking for, illegible white text over the image with no shadow-bar or other effect to improve legibility, even the illegible grey on grey in the footer reeks of whatever artist under the DELUSION they are a designer having zero clue about the most basic restrictions of what makes a speedy and useful website -- and that's BEFORE we even talk about the scripttardery that kicks in as you type. OF COURSE it had no chance against Google... and Google's market traction has far less to do with it than most would think!

... and I'm not saying art is bad, but it needs to know its place. Web DESIGN is engineering incorporating not just art, but also accessibility minimums, bandwidth limitations, networking optimization, and user-experience. Sadly so much of the artsy flashy nonsense people slop into websites to go "ooh shiny" takes a dump on that; and it's because the PSD jockeys and JavaScript nutters who call themselves "designers" or "front end developers" simply don't know enough about HTML, CSS, accessibility, usability, or even basic network traffic to be designing a blasted thing.

Even major art websites realize this -- just look at DeviantArt, which gets piss poor marks even from its users for "design" when it's actually a brilliant design. (or would be if they made it elastic instead of doing everything in pixel fonts; WCAG says to use EM, so use 'em!). So many "interface designers" slop their PSD's onto DeviantArt not realizing they could learn a hell of a lot from that site's example!

The DeviantArt website itself is just simple shades of green in legible contrasts, adequate padding to make the sections obvious, and NOTHING that distracts from the actual art that's the CONTENT!

Pinterest, Dribble, Juxtapost, Futaba/Wakaba boards. Clean simple designs low in the "ooh shiny" rubbish that puts what's really important -- CONTENT -- front and center!

... anything more than that is again, just dumping a can of shellac on a pile. No matter how fine a sheen you polish it to, the result is still just bug excrement on horse manure. That's why you DON'T see a lot of actually successful websites pulling those types of stunts. You only find such hooh-hah on sites of small businesses who get suckered by the shiny factor, high end companies for whom their web presence is a money-pit afterthought, or the sites of the deluded fools who THINK they know what design is, when all they know is art.

Just look at how Apple is pissing their own bed right now! Going from the site that started the flat design craze to adding more and more images and animations that suck down so much screen space and bandwidth, you have to jump through hoops of fire just to find even the most basic of information about their actual products -- undoing a decade plus of innovation and foresight. Hell you visit any of the product pages and it's like a giant (doesn't even fit my 1440p display) promotional poster from a fly-by-night Korean product listing on e-bay. I'm half expecting them to bring back skeuomorphism on their site and OS interfaces any day now...

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