As in "All the books looks the same"? I see nothing wrong with finding optimal ways to present information.
All Websites Look the Same
51–60 of 107 posts
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#52Definitely prefer that layout compared to the one used on novolume.co.uk.
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#53I take issue with the current 'standard' design, but only indirectly. I feel like giant home screens give companies the freedom to create a great looking webpage without any actual content - like a giant landing page. Since they all look the same, it's easy to compare and contrast. I can recall a number of times scrolling through the entire home page for a company, only to still be confused about what the product act…
"I can recall a number of times scrolling through the entire home page for a company, only to still be confused about what the product actually does."
This seems to be a major problem lately with startups, especially ones promoted on YC. The home page is often one big image with a little vague text and a "sign up" button. Half the time you can't even tell if it's a shipping product, or much about what it does.
There are people who will click on anything, so this strategy looks, at first, like it's working. ("We have a zillion users and signups! We're ready for another financing round!") As the clickbait advertising industry has discovered, the click on everything crowd does not buy much. Most clicks come from about 10% of users, and they're not the users with money.
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#54I take issue with the current 'standard' design, but only indirectly. I feel like giant home screens give companies the freedom to create a great looking webpage without any actual content - like a giant landing page. Since they all look the same, it's easy to compare and contrast. I can recall a number of times scrolling through the entire home page for a company, only to still be confused about what the product act…
When it comes to 'landing pages' (where describing the purpose of a company or product is the goal), I think the problem is primarily that it's just really hard to do right, content-wise. The visual design is at most a secondary problem.
A more general-purpose home page has it's challenges, of course, but often it's really just about showing something pretty and guiding users to pages such as 'pricing', 'buy/shop', 'contact', 'about us', etc.
A landing page, on the other hand, is basically the same as creating an ad or a commercial. You have a limited time to 'sell' something, and the fact that you need a page for it means that it's not immediately obvious what you're selling. You have to write ad copy, consider the visuals, target audience, selling points, etc. This is much more difficult than just having a few pages that do very specific things, and a home page that points to them.
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#55Let's make website like architects make buildings. It's more important to be original than beautiful or functional. Let's put the navigation menus at the bottom of the page and the disclaimer at the top. Let's randomize the order of the links and elements so that every user has a unique and original experience on every visit. In fact why use english? That's so boring. Let's use hieroglyph!
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#56I take issue with the current 'standard' design, but only indirectly. I feel like giant home screens give companies the freedom to create a great looking webpage without any actual content - like a giant landing page. Since they all look the same, it's easy to compare and contrast. I can recall a number of times scrolling through the entire home page for a company, only to still be confused about what the product act…
I find it's often easier to find out what a company does by doing a quick Google search, than to figure it out from their website.
Me too. If the company is notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, usually the article's first paragraph tells you what you want to know of the company much better than its landing and About page.
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#57Aaand... Looking at their landing page[1] I can see they've chosen to go with a horizontal page layout. Because they use a non standard page layout they have a black stripe bumping in and out of the viewport instructing the user that they can/should scroll. This is quite a common layout among artsy portfolio themes[2]. Has anyone ever tried to sidescroll a web page lately? On my Yosemite MBP with latest Firefox/Chrom…
Ugh, obviously they hijack scrolling. Unusable on Safari. Though I think side scrolling is a really bad idea it would work just fine if the designer lets me use native scrolling.
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#58Honestly I'm fine with most websites sticking to a similar layout as it helps me navigate it faster plus it's just trendy right now so that'll pass like all web design trends before it.
Having said that this specific layout is garbage, in my opinion and not because of its design but because of the way it's used. It's so incredibly rare to see a company use this type of layout without filling in every single space with utter bullshit about generic buzzwords and it just takes up so much space. I can't count how many start-up websites I go to and I have to scroll down for pages just to figure out what they even sell because everything up front is large, generic images that don't mean anything followed by lots of very general phrases and buzzwords.
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#59> At times I think back to when websites were produced in Flash. For all its downfalls (and there were a lot) one thing was always true. Flash sites rarely looked the same. The author clearly doesn't remember what it was actually like to arrive on a Flash site, and play the fun games of 'where has the designer hidden the navigation today?' and 'oh crap, how do I turn the sound off?'. Design patterns are there to ensu…
I fucking.hated.flash websites.
HATED.
With a passion.
Even when it was being done it was a stupid tech trick from jackass developers, it was never a designer driven thing except as a means of doing layouts that were you couldn't do in html at the time. and it was NEVER about usability.
I hated that trend and thank god it didn't last very long specifically BECAUSE it threw the users under the bus.
Re: All Websites Look the Same
#60I think it's safe to say, at least from my view, that Bootstrap is the reason for it. Bootstrap made this format easy and clean, and it works well with mobile. Websites will look like this until someone comes out with the next thing that's easier and/or cleaner and/or works better in mobile and then a couple years later THAT will be the format you're seeing everywhere. I don't think this is a bad thing. At least it's…
Bootstrap didn't invent such websdesign, it was experimented with, learned and improved collectively. If anything, the library implemented these (almost) standards that were wildly used.
He didn't say they invented it, he said they made it easy to do.