Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting.
Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites.
I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article.
Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.
> Awwwards is not representative of the web at large
100%. I used to work at a studio specifically targeting winning awards with awwwards and it's definitely not the same as working on the normal web. Flashiness is way more important than performance there, be it in UX, conversions or load times.
It was a good space to play around with things like animations and webgl, but turns out that if your business needs to convert, those things can often come in the way of that.
It is representative of the web at large. This flashiness promoted by award design sites are taken as inspiration to develop your average corporate site.
Look at any corporate site, all of them have the same structure - big text and images, animations as you scroll and unsuitable for viewing on slightly older devices.
Look at each site of the day from the last week, and compare them to your average corporate site.
10th: no resemblance whatsoever, enormous unforced usability problems (e.g. scrolljacking).
9th: grossly unusable, no resemblance whatsoever. Exemplar of the worst excesses of a highly-ranked Awwwards site.
8th: a lot of resemblance, but the “interesting” parts are the bad parts.
7th: see 8th.
6th: superficial resemblance, but with far more problems due to being “interesting”.
5th: no real resemblance, bad scrolljacking problems.
4th: see 5th.
Long-known-to-be-harmful trends like scrolljacking and replacing the cursor (probably with a `backdrop-filter: invert(1)` circle, these days) seem to appear on well more than half of the Awwwards site; but they are fortunately rare on the web at large.
I’m not saying corporate sites are without problems—“yes, things are stupidly bad”—but the persistent stupidity that is scroll-linked entrance animations are a very different kettle of fish from the problems of a typical Awwwards site.
> Instead we get auto-playing videos, excessive animations, aggressive pop-ups, and disappearing text. It's frustrating
I randomly pulled up stripe.com alternatives [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] - literally all of them have the same style of global menu, unwanted animations as you scroll, big text, big images, and I guarantee you none of them will work properly in an older browser, (try a 2 yr old mobile os).
The author clearly mentions this as a problem, just too many animations, for no reason at all. Are you telling me these weren't inspired from awwwards?
Design has gone to the gutters - material design/windows 11 design/liquid glass design. All of them are sacrificing usability over unwanted animations.
I seriously miss the days of blackberry and nokia. Usability was paramount those days.
> Long-known-to-be-harmful trends like scrolljacking and replacing the cursor ... seem to appear on well more than half of the Awwwards site; but they are fortunately rare on the web at large
Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].
Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3].
> irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].
I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated".
The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous.
Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables.
If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true:
1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use
and
2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Yes the fuzzy use of “complicated” is part of the problem with this article. I am assuming “complicated” here means it’s consequential to users from a bad UX perspective because the article mentions some business stats:
> Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales.
In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight).
The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world
I get what you’re saying, but I also think the two are strongly correlated.
If you have a website with excellent UX, but it’s massively bloated and has noticeably slow load times on anything less than a 1 Gbps connection, that’s making for a frustrating experience for a large swath of your users (though maybe you also are targeting a niche crowd and know that they all have adequate internet speed).
It’s also possible to have both. McMaster-Carr [0] had its web dev moment last year when tech influencers rediscovered what basic performance optimizations can do, but hype aside, it’s legitimately good design (to me). It’s simple, intuitive, and fast. It’s nothing it doesn’t need to be.
How fast can I use it, how smooth can I use it, etc.
My point is about how good can I do what I want to do on a website.
For instance a shopping site can as fast and snappy as it likes, if I can’t find the right articles is useless.
Amazon and ebay come to my mind who ignore even simple exact search terms just to show things I didn’t search for.
> Looking at performance is making the second step before the first.
I'm not sure I agree. Bad design can ruin a fast UI, and bad performance can ruin a good UI. I'm not sure one is more important than the other, because they're necessary parts of the UX. They should be designed for together, not independently.
Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s.
Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
Well it’s easier to get you hooked and show you more and better targeted ads if you get the app. There’s a value add, it’s just not for you, the user. It’s for Reddit and their customers (advertisers).
Reddit is one of those sad stories where some features are now only available on the mobile app and the endpoints on their API are not documented so you can't access them any other way.
I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simple as a list (Facebook does this), open a random porn site or take away your life savings.
That is some rose colored welding googles you're wearing there. In the late nineties we had applets, activex, pages crammed with animated gifs, and the browser wars were in full swing between SUN, Microsoft, netscape, internet explorer. And then flash rocked up.
Again, it shows how the OP railing against over-design is so subjective. A lot of sites are meant to be interesting ways of showing information, or just people expressing themselves.
People complaining about the design of websites (and writing snooty blog posts about it on usenet) happened in the nineties too, even more so when flash took over.
Any time I land on a webpage that has text that goes full width left-to-right with a white background and black text I feel there's a good chance it will be very useful content. I miss that.
Websites in 1990s and 2000s did not have UX flows that we have nowadays. Yes, most of it is extremely bloated. But some of the flows we have right now, would just not be possible with the 2000s components. There are also billions of more people browsing the web nowadays as well.
I'd say it's in between, the early web was funny but wild (popups or whatever the guy decided to do with dhtml) but there was an era of stable light ux, maybe just before the web 2, where you had a bit of ajax but simple webpages and near no bloat.
The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine!
I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.
I agree with you on Tailwind, but React/Vue solve the problem of creating complex webapps. If you write HTML and modify DOM manually with JS, it only works for relatively simple projects. As soon as it becomes complex, it becomes hard to track which JS code changes what DOM.
Another thing is maintability. Working with single-file components with state management systems is just a pleasure.
Awwwards websites are pretty much exclusively web design agency sites. These are selling the services of those agencies, which lean towards art direction, graphic design and video production. Nobody is hiring them to build the marketing website for Stripe, or Shopify or Astro or whatever else lies in the boring world of cookie-cutter SaaS sites.
There was a time when sites were created purely for artistic reasons and would get awards, which encouraged visitors to check those sites out. That era of the web has been over for at least 15 years, or roughly when Flash gave up the ghost. Since then, web design became about how fast it could get you to hit the "Sign Up / Buy / Subscribe" button. And it turns out, they're still very heavy bandwidth-wise, only instead of interesting interaction design, the heft comes from the JS frameworks and invisible analytics scripts running underneath the hood.
Many web pages are impossible to read without ad-blockers, Safari Reader, or whatever Firefox does to print (to pdf). I've tried other readability extensions and they didn't satisfy.
Firefox has a reader mode. It does not work on every site, probably because on some sites it can't decide where it's the content. Examples with Firefox nightly on Android: it works on the site this thread is about, it does not work on HN.
Sorry, I missed that. It's right in the URL bar, or it was until I started typing this reply. Not pretty, though. Thanks for pointing it out. The print rendition, original or simplified, is usually great.
I too use my share of simplifications (Brave Browser, Ghostery, archive.is ) but the fact is until ~2008, web content was auxiliary to the main form of content ingestion via newspapers, magazines, TV, radio. Now that the Web is one of the main forms of content distribution, there's paywalls, ads, newsletter modals. People deserve to get compensated for their contributions, but it's really annoying how poor flashy web design has become ubiquitous at least partially for that reason.
I really hate animations I have to sit through just to use the site. Even if it's just a second or two, that's a second or two per time I use the site and that adds up over time especially if I am forced to use the site like certain corporate SaaS's I could name.
So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email.
I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.
As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.
Eh, depending on the amount of content on the page astro + react is fine. Astro lets you output everything as static html so it doesn’t hurt your page scores
I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
I remember when doing web development in 2001 in a company with massive traffic we had a total size limit imposed in each landing page or site, kind of what it's still required for ad networks.
It wasn't unusual to reject some designs due to weight. 500 Kb tops at the begging, so degraded backgrounds were a no-go.
Judging the state of web design by award-winning websites is like judging the state of movies by Cannes winners. The movies that win at Cannes are not the movies most people are watching.
I think a much bigger problem are the endless ads, pop-ups, distracting animations etc.
turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns
seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business decision and to get on with their day
disclosures i am the grug brained dev of https://harcstack.org which is trying to leverage HTMX to make the pain go away
> Let's be honest: you're designing to impress other designers, not users. And that's the problem.
I've referred to this as "CV driven development". Although to be fair that developer that designs a microservice architecture for 50 users is not better either.
But on the whole, I don't agree with the title. My feeling is - overall - pages have become a lot less gimmicky than they used to be.
And so little is delivered with the 2.5mb. Worrying more that so much traffic is bot traffic, and bloating sites becomes significantly wasted resources.
I just rewrote a wordpress site made 7 years ago for a client as a static site. Replaced the index.html 4 image parallax with a 3 image css slider (mobile, desktop versions) and added 5 languages for the 5 pages the site has.
complete website now weighs 15.9 MB - 14.5 MB is images (395 including responsive versions plus fallback twin). The index page now has a total of 558KB while the same page in the old WP site clocks 21MB - (5.7MB for the 4 images) which it loads in steps 8MB - then 17MB and jumping to final 21MB when I move the cursor from the reload button over to the page.
There's a happy medium here. Yeah, the Awwwards site the author linked to showcases excesses, but isn't that the point? Those sites are designed to be excessive.
I'm mindful of performance on the sites I make but I also don't want the entire internet to prioritize shopping basket conversions. Some whimsy can be good.
My experience is that CTOs don't care about animations, rounded corners, or what not - they care about metrics. These artsy bullshit layouts are suggested by design teams and the technical side either doesn't care/is content to delegate or there's someone at director level who wants to be the next Steve Jobs and empowers design.
This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.
It's so funny to see an incompetent CTO thinking things like, as the example, animations, is just designers being designers. Go ahead and remove ChatGPT animations and make the user wait for the whole text to be ready without any feedback. Let me know how those metrics go.
Animations are not necessarily bullshit, but all of the sites in the linked list of rewards are. Sites which hijack scroll to do something else ("you scrolled down and watch the window in this picture of a house open up and reveal the next text block") are an example of something in vogue amongst designers which are harder to read, harder to navigate, and are just artsy bullshit.
This CTO is bugging designers to not do anything moving and insisted on adding a "no animation" mode to our apps.
Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder...
And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.
Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting.
Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites.
I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article.
Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.
> Awwwards is not representative of the web at large
100%. I used to work at a studio specifically targeting winning awards with awwwards and it's definitely not the same as working on the normal web. Flashiness is way more important than performance there, be it in UX, conversions or load times.
It was a good space to play around with things like animations and webgl, but turns out that if your business needs to convert, those things can often come in the way of that.
It is representative of the web at large. This flashiness promoted by award design sites are taken as inspiration to develop your average corporate site.
Look at any corporate site, all of them have the same structure - big text and images, animations as you scroll and unsuitable for viewing on slightly older devices.
Look at each site of the day from the last week, and compare them to your average corporate site.
10th: no resemblance whatsoever, enormous unforced usability problems (e.g. scrolljacking).
9th: grossly unusable, no resemblance whatsoever. Exemplar of the worst excesses of a highly-ranked Awwwards site.
8th: a lot of resemblance, but the “interesting” parts are the bad parts.
7th: see 8th.
6th: superficial resemblance, but with far more problems due to being “interesting”.
5th: no real resemblance, bad scrolljacking problems.
4th: see 5th.
Long-known-to-be-harmful trends like scrolljacking and replacing the cursor (probably with a `backdrop-filter: invert(1)` circle, these days) seem to appear on well more than half of the Awwwards site; but they are fortunately rare on the web at large.
I’m not saying corporate sites are without problems—“yes, things are stupidly bad”—but the persistent stupidity that is scroll-linked entrance animations are a very different kettle of fish from the problems of a typical Awwwards site.
From the blog -
> Instead we get auto-playing videos, excessive animations, aggressive pop-ups, and disappearing text. It's frustrating
I randomly pulled up stripe.com alternatives [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] - literally all of them have the same style of global menu, unwanted animations as you scroll, big text, big images, and I guarantee you none of them will work properly in an older browser, (try a 2 yr old mobile os).
[0] - https://tipalti.com/resources/learn/stripe-competitors-and-a... [1] - https://tipalti.com/en-eu/ [2] - https://trolley.com/pay/ [3] - https://www.paypal.com/nz/home [4] - https://www.payoneer.com/
Here are first 3 sites I pulled from producthunt - [5] [6] [7] - again literally the same structure and problems.
[5] - https://chroniclehq.com/ [6] - https://bubble.io [7] - https://wegic.ai/
The author clearly mentions this as a problem, just too many animations, for no reason at all. Are you telling me these weren't inspired from awwwards?
Design has gone to the gutters - material design/windows 11 design/liquid glass design. All of them are sacrificing usability over unwanted animations.
I seriously miss the days of blackberry and nokia. Usability was paramount those days.
> Long-known-to-be-harmful trends like scrolljacking and replacing the cursor ... seem to appear on well more than half of the Awwwards site; but they are fortunately rare on the web at large
Give it some time my friend, it wont take long [https://design.google/]
thats why i always choose dribbble as a go-to for a nice looking yet not "award winning" stuff
[dead]
Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].
Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3].
0. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte...
1. https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics
2. https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript
3. https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280...
> irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].
I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated".
The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous.
Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables.
If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true:
1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use
and
2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Yes the fuzzy use of “complicated” is part of the problem with this article. I am assuming “complicated” here means it’s consequential to users from a bad UX perspective because the article mentions some business stats:
> Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales.
In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight).
The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world
Performance is also an irrelevant metric.
Usability is.
I get what you’re saying, but I also think the two are strongly correlated.
If you have a website with excellent UX, but it’s massively bloated and has noticeably slow load times on anything less than a 1 Gbps connection, that’s making for a frustrating experience for a large swath of your users (though maybe you also are targeting a niche crowd and know that they all have adequate internet speed).
It’s also possible to have both. McMaster-Carr [0] had its web dev moment last year when tech influencers rediscovered what basic performance optimizations can do, but hype aside, it’s legitimately good design (to me). It’s simple, intuitive, and fast. It’s nothing it doesn’t need to be.
[0]: https://www.mcmaster.com/
Performance is not a metric. I mentioned web perf metrics that focus on UX, such as usability: https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics
> User-centric performance metrics
It’s still about performance.
How fast can I use it, how smooth can I use it, etc.
My point is about how good can I do what I want to do on a website.
For instance a shopping site can as fast and snappy as it likes, if I can’t find the right articles is useless. Amazon and ebay come to my mind who ignore even simple exact search terms just to show things I didn’t search for.
> if I can’t find the right articles is useless
that's not a web design/frontend issue, unless they hide the search bar.
As a user I don’t care about frontend or backend, I care about UX for what I want to do.
Performance is a feature [0]
0: https://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/
that's like saying horsepower is irrelevant metric, lap times is
you kinda need the one to get the other in the decent place, even if it is not the only one.
Lack of performance WILL turn every design into mediocre or worse
Bad performance makes even good design bad but good performance doesn’t make bad design good.
Looking at performance is making the second step before the first.
Performance is the means to an end, but if you fixate on performance, the means becomes the end
> Looking at performance is making the second step before the first.
I'm not sure I agree. Bad design can ruin a fast UI, and bad performance can ruin a good UI. I'm not sure one is more important than the other, because they're necessary parts of the UX. They should be designed for together, not independently.
Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s.
Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
Well it’s easier to get you hooked and show you more and better targeted ads if you get the app. There’s a value add, it’s just not for you, the user. It’s for Reddit and their customers (advertisers).
One reason I always refuse to get Apps and get pulled into the surveillance world.
Reddit is one of those sad stories where some features are now only available on the mobile app and the endpoints on their API are not documented so you can't access them any other way.
I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simple as a list (Facebook does this), open a random porn site or take away your life savings.
Just a sad state of affairs overall.
That is some rose colored welding googles you're wearing there. In the late nineties we had applets, activex, pages crammed with animated gifs, and the browser wars were in full swing between SUN, Microsoft, netscape, internet explorer. And then flash rocked up. Again, it shows how the OP railing against over-design is so subjective. A lot of sites are meant to be interesting ways of showing information, or just people expressing themselves. People complaining about the design of websites (and writing snooty blog posts about it on usenet) happened in the nineties too, even more so when flash took over.
Any time I land on a webpage that has text that goes full width left-to-right with a white background and black text I feel there's a good chance it will be very useful content. I miss that.
I loved this too. The frontpage era content actually still works really well on today's modern screens. Most of them barely have any CSS in them even.
Just to note, HN does not got full width on my screen, and the background is not white.
I pretty much set everything I can to dark mode these days, so personally don't agree with white backgrounds in general.
Websites in 1990s and 2000s did not have UX flows that we have nowadays. Yes, most of it is extremely bloated. But some of the flows we have right now, would just not be possible with the 2000s components. There are also billions of more people browsing the web nowadays as well.
I'd say it's in between, the early web was funny but wild (popups or whatever the guy decided to do with dhtml) but there was an era of stable light ux, maybe just before the web 2, where you had a bit of ajax but simple webpages and near no bloat.
I'm curious about which flows you mean.
The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine!
I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.
> The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine!
I don’t know about you, but I’m not running flash like it’s the early 2000s.
I agree with you on Tailwind, but React/Vue solve the problem of creating complex webapps. If you write HTML and modify DOM manually with JS, it only works for relatively simple projects. As soon as it becomes complex, it becomes hard to track which JS code changes what DOM.
Another thing is maintability. Working with single-file components with state management systems is just a pleasure.
I, for one, am happy that I'm no longer managing state across hundreds of independent jQuery values and making raw XHR calls to jsonp endpoints.
Websites today exist to sell things.
Awwwards websites are pretty much exclusively web design agency sites. These are selling the services of those agencies, which lean towards art direction, graphic design and video production. Nobody is hiring them to build the marketing website for Stripe, or Shopify or Astro or whatever else lies in the boring world of cookie-cutter SaaS sites.
There was a time when sites were created purely for artistic reasons and would get awards, which encouraged visitors to check those sites out. That era of the web has been over for at least 15 years, or roughly when Flash gave up the ghost. Since then, web design became about how fast it could get you to hit the "Sign Up / Buy / Subscribe" button. And it turns out, they're still very heavy bandwidth-wise, only instead of interesting interaction design, the heft comes from the JS frameworks and invisible analytics scripts running underneath the hood.
Many web pages are impossible to read without ad-blockers, Safari Reader, or whatever Firefox does to print (to pdf). I've tried other readability extensions and they didn't satisfy.
Firefox has a reader mode. It does not work on every site, probably because on some sites it can't decide where it's the content. Examples with Firefox nightly on Android: it works on the site this thread is about, it does not work on HN.
Sorry, I missed that. It's right in the URL bar, or it was until I started typing this reply. Not pretty, though. Thanks for pointing it out. The print rendition, original or simplified, is usually great.
No worries. By the way, I noticed right now that Reader Mode is available in this page for desktop Firefox but not for Android FF.
I too use my share of simplifications (Brave Browser, Ghostery, archive.is ) but the fact is until ~2008, web content was auxiliary to the main form of content ingestion via newspapers, magazines, TV, radio. Now that the Web is one of the main forms of content distribution, there's paywalls, ads, newsletter modals. People deserve to get compensated for their contributions, but it's really annoying how poor flashy web design has become ubiquitous at least partially for that reason.
In using brave (username checks out)
I feel like this article is bait for web designers to get defensive about and self-identify as bloatlords.
I really hate animations I have to sit through just to use the site. Even if it's just a second or two, that's a second or two per time I use the site and that adds up over time especially if I am forced to use the site like certain corporate SaaS's I could name.
So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email.
I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.
As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.
Perhaps it's the people?
Eh, depending on the amount of content on the page astro + react is fine. Astro lets you output everything as static html so it doesn’t hurt your page scores
I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
They took two days and used react components and all sorts of shit and we nearly missed the deadline due to it.
The page I did was less than 4K with all content and css embedded and took me 10 minutes.
There's doing the job and there's costing the company a boat load of money doing the job.
"You see, I have this hammer."
"I need a screw driven."
"Hammer! I have a hammer. Just one. This one."
Ok fair enough, but I think you just have incompetent devs
That is precisely my point.
There should be no context change from not using React, unless one is a very junior programmer
o_O
Not sure what you were intending to say, but here's what I parsed when reading that post:
"There should be no context change from <changing the context>".
I remember when doing web development in 2001 in a company with massive traffic we had a total size limit imposed in each landing page or site, kind of what it's still required for ad networks.
It wasn't unusual to reject some designs due to weight. 500 Kb tops at the begging, so degraded backgrounds were a no-go.
Judging the state of web design by award-winning websites is like judging the state of movies by Cannes winners. The movies that win at Cannes are not the movies most people are watching.
I think a much bigger problem are the endless ads, pop-ups, distracting animations etc.
turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns
seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business decision and to get on with their day
disclosures i am the grug brained dev of https://harcstack.org which is trying to leverage HTMX to make the pain go away
Making server requests for every interaction is the least grug way of serving html
we’re gonna have to agree to differ on that one …
The irony of complaining about over designed sites only to have a hidden form be revealed from the bottom of the page.
> The web exists to connect people and share information. Let's not confuse it with an art gallery.
websites are art
Websites aren't art. They can be, just like this comment can be art. Especially if I add a fancy made up word to it. Forthedolomaznia.
> Let's be honest: you're designing to impress other designers, not users. And that's the problem.
I've referred to this as "CV driven development". Although to be fair that developer that designs a microservice architecture for 50 users is not better either.
But on the whole, I don't agree with the title. My feeling is - overall - pages have become a lot less gimmicky than they used to be.
This is an unkind argument.
There is no one true way to prioritize design in all contexts. That defeats the point of design: highly-contextualized problem solving.
In some contexts simplicity and speed are not the highest priorities; memorability is.
I laughed when I saw the footer
This brings me back to the days of Flash-based websites...
”Yet here we are - the average website now weighs around 2.5MB according to HTTP Archive. That's heavier than the original Doom game.”
And so little is delivered with the 2.5mb. Worrying more that so much traffic is bot traffic, and bloating sites becomes significantly wasted resources.
I just rewrote a wordpress site made 7 years ago for a client as a static site. Replaced the index.html 4 image parallax with a 3 image css slider (mobile, desktop versions) and added 5 languages for the 5 pages the site has.
complete website now weighs 15.9 MB - 14.5 MB is images (395 including responsive versions plus fallback twin). The index page now has a total of 558KB while the same page in the old WP site clocks 21MB - (5.7MB for the 4 images) which it loads in steps 8MB - then 17MB and jumping to final 21MB when I move the cursor from the reload button over to the page.
I'm starting to think that lightweight framework for web apps might be a wasm-dos-win3.11 or wasm-wince target.
There's a happy medium here. Yeah, the Awwwards site the author linked to showcases excesses, but isn't that the point? Those sites are designed to be excessive.
I'm mindful of performance on the sites I make but I also don't want the entire internet to prioritize shopping basket conversions. Some whimsy can be good.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ unironically
A thousand times yes. One word: " Enshittification" captures what has become of the web.
In other news, water is wet.
Oi designers? You mean oi enshittifing CTOs?
My experience is that CTOs don't care about animations, rounded corners, or what not - they care about metrics. These artsy bullshit layouts are suggested by design teams and the technical side either doesn't care/is content to delegate or there's someone at director level who wants to be the next Steve Jobs and empowers design.
This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.
It's so funny to see an incompetent CTO thinking things like, as the example, animations, is just designers being designers. Go ahead and remove ChatGPT animations and make the user wait for the whole text to be ready without any feedback. Let me know how those metrics go.
Animations are not necessarily bullshit, but all of the sites in the linked list of rewards are. Sites which hijack scroll to do something else ("you scrolled down and watch the window in this picture of a house open up and reveal the next text block") are an example of something in vogue amongst designers which are harder to read, harder to navigate, and are just artsy bullshit.
This CTO is bugging designers to not do anything moving and insisted on adding a "no animation" mode to our apps.
Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder...
And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.
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