Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web designs are getting too complicated

websmith.studio

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#21

Post by neepi »

shoeb00m wrote: post #20
neepi wrote: post #14

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 tur…

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.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#22

Post by jiggawatts »

neepi wrote: post #21
shoeb00m wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#23

Post by cupofjoakim »

chrismorgan wrote: post #11

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…

> 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.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#24

Post by cyberax »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #6

Oi designers? You mean oi enshittifing CTOs?

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.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#25

Post by croes »

jameslk wrote: post #12

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…

Performance is also an irrelevant metric.

Usability is.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#26

Post by agumonkey »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #18
neya wrote: post #15

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 simp…

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.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#27

Post by jameslk »

croes wrote: post #25
jameslk wrote: post #12

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…

Performance is also an irrelevant metric. Usability is.

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

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#28

Post by shoeb00m »

neepi wrote: post #21
shoeb00m wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok fair enough, but I think you just have incompetent devs

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#29

Post by neepi »

shoeb00m wrote: post #28
neepi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok fair enough, but I think you just have incompetent devs

That is precisely my point.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#30

Post by [deleted] »

neya wrote: post #15

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 simp…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN