Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters

Boring maybe, but Bootstrap is extremely practical for non-designers like me.

I feel like Bootstrap captured more than 80% of the features I want for less than 20% of the time (or cost) it would take to make something from scratch.

Second, navigation on websites became much more predictable. The examples they show of Web Design 3.0 look difficult to navigate. Aside from increasing dwell time from confused users, there probably isn't a big benefit.

In the future, I see custom website design being accessible for large companies that need their site to evoke a certain brand image. For the rest of us, Bootstrap will continue to evolve (Web Design 2.5) to provide +80% of what we want.

Seriously, most of the examples of "Web Design 3.0" look like a piece of modern art. That's great for showcasing your portfolio as a web designer, but if you try to be artsy with the menu of your restaurant I'm going to the competitor.

Compare the "Web 2.0 vs Web 3.0 in MS Word" comparison. On the left: "Web 2.0" (looks like "Web 1.0" to me) with quickly skimmable paragraphs, concise information and a clear overview of where to look for what information. On the right, a flat-out clusterfuck of random boxes and pictures that doesn't tell you anything at all.

By the way, we already had free positioning in the "old" web; stacked floats and absolute positioning are nothing new. It became easier with flexbox and css grids, but only for people writing actual HTML/CSS.

Whenever I see a website made by a tool like this, I generally don't even bother reading what it has to say. The themes are always form-over-function with huge swathes of whitespace and PNGs that suck up my mobile data. If you're a designer and looking to make a website, please get someone competent to write proper code for you instead of wasting your design on an awful tool like this.

Let's learn all about accessibility and then spit in its face.

The conclusion is fairly misleading because it's missing the glaringly obvious answer: designers could learn HTML and CSS. I fought it forever thinking that there will always be a WYSIWYG and they'll eventually get so good they'll spit out the code for me.

The reality is much more frustrating. Adobe Muse was promising as it helped with responsive design and the free form creativity this article talks about, BUT it had a ton of issues. Relying on it for projects with clients was risky as one update would kill your production, as it often did. Reverting back a version was a solution so you could finish the project, but the features added to the update were crucial, and as a designer I wanted those too.

Then it became a game of learn the software de jure, and hope it's A) good enough B) will have support for a long time C) isn't cheap, and D) doesn't take forever to learn.

Eventually, I discovered grid and flex box and have been teaching myself HTML, CSS, and JS. Code isn't going away. Software does.

Also, I don't trust any WYSIWYG editor to produce clean and concise code. I'm afraid it'll spit out a bunch of divs and be extremely inefficient. Not to mention accessibility and semantics. Even if designing to a grid and carefully watching my proportions and where items sit on or next to each other, I still fear the program will spit out some ugly code.

Mainly, when using a WYSIWYG, it ends up taking just as long as it would to code, especially if you want it to look really good.

So now, my goal is design like the Web 3.0 described in this article, but with the good old tools with which I have full control. It's like a carpenter in his wood shop, as opposed to using a combination of legos and Ikea. No matter what, to have ultimate control is the best, and it remains to be seen if Nicepage or any design tool will ever be as good as the most fundamental of tools (code).

I suppose the reality is there's a huge spectrum of designers. There's the developer oriented ones, which resources are aplenty. Then on the other end of the spectrum are artists, who need a blank canvas to fill out their ideas. One is quick and good enough, the other long and the end result likely janky behind the curtain. Nicepage seems to want to appeal to the the artist.

With enough time, a true designer can understand the full spectrum and see that fully custom coded websites, even if they take a long time, are still likely to be the most unique and longest lasting.