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Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters

nicepage.com

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Re: Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters

#2

Post by werds »

While I realise this is essentially marketing for Nicepage, the article is very good. The templates here https://nicepage.com/templates are mainly informative sites like portfolios, restaurants, dental practises etc.. It is going to be a while before the typical functional ecommerce sites we use use everyday adopt a more creative approach. It is just too much of a risk to present a user with an unusual design and a learning curve. When you just want users to part with their cash, the site needs to be as predictable as possible.

Re: Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters

#5

Post by rchaud »

Thanks for putting this together. I don't know if "Web Design 3.0" is a term people recognize, but I do agree that this particular style is based around bringing in more elements from print design to digital. CSS3, Flexbox and now CSS Grid has made a lot of that possible.

The bigger challenge now is that "web design" isn't really respected as a discipline, since half of the customers associate it with cheap templated Wordpress/Drupal sites, and the other half care only about utility (if it's a web app), and little to nothing about how the design speaks to its brand. It's their call of course, and if they want a barebones site, it's on the designer to show them that a custom design can bring in more business.

PS - the Pinterest-sourced design examples are nice. I wouldn't have discovered them myself since Pinterest's UX and takeover of Google Image search results has soured me on them.

Re: Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters

#6

Post by def_true_false »

The article keeps going on about creativity without giving a single reason why anyone would want that. Not everything needs to be original, not everything needs creativity. Some (most?) websites just need to work -- i.e. present the content in a readable manner. I'm not sure if relative offsets on colored rectangular backgrounds help much. Seriously, most of the examples look worse than the supposedly obsolete bootstrap templates.

Re: Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters

#8

Post by asark »

def_true_false wrote: post #6

The article keeps going on about creativity without giving a single reason why anyone would want that. Not everything needs to be original, not everything needs creativity. Some (most?) websites just need to work -- i.e. present the content in a readable manner. I'm not sure if relative offsets on colored rectangular backgrounds help much. Seriously, most of the examples look worse than the supposedly obsolete bootst…

A key miss with the print vs. digital design is that digital's interactive, and you don't usually see the whole thing at once. Plus, you know, screen sizes. "Unique" may be attention-grabbing, it may look nice, and it may help you peacock "we are with-it and well-funded enough to spend money keeping up with design trends" but it's gonna harm UX more often than not.

It was nice when every site settled on the header-sidebar-footer two- to three-column layout. You knew where stuff would be. "Bootstrap" design is nice (though often less-nice than old-school column layouts, at least on desktop, because more spread out and less predictable) for similar reasons.

This stuff for "experience" sites is one thing. For anything else it's, as mentioned above, peacock-signaling over usability. Often the flourish-filled stuff is outright broken on some not-uncommon browser and platform combos—I saw a Tesla marketing site the other day that's broken on Safari on MacOS—though that's more common when they screw with interactions than layouts, but often the two go hand-in-hand.

I have no doubt this will be A Thing. In the overwhelming majority of cases it's used, it will harm UX. It looks expensive to do right across platforms and screen sizes, and will probably be done wrong (i.e. be broken) more often than not. So the cycle continues.

Re: Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters

#9

Post by tempguy9999 »

My requirements for a website are: I get the information I need then I leave ASAP.

This is held up if the site requires cookies, or blocked outright if it requires scripts eg. to present text (q.v. the washington post). That is about all.

This sums it up:

> We are strongly against the fact that designers are limited in the freedom of creativity

I'm all for limiting their creativity in areas outside the purely artistic. I want usable websites (= useful info concisely and safely presented, with respect for others' disabilities), but creative types often don't seem to care (edit: or know; they're often clueless about usability).

(to be fair, this website is certainly not bad)

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