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Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

mohkohn.co.uk

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Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#151

Post by dylan604 »

danudey wrote: post #118
naravara wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the Flash animation splash pages I was forced to sit through before being able to look up hours of operation.

As a teenager I remember going to a website for... a city, I think? And their 'sidebar' was a Java applet that did nothing but provide links for you to click with on-hover effects. The page used frames; the applet was in the left-side frame and the content was in the main frame on the right. The applet took 30 seconds to load. Once it loaded, it showed five buttons to click to get to different sections of the site. W…

Every language can say that bad developers write bad code with it while good developers write good code with it.

I would like to say the early interweb was just a learning experience, but today's interweb hasn't learned any of the lessons. It's just changed which language the lesson is being relearned

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#152

Post by bryanrasmussen »

sorenjan wrote: post #51
wmanley wrote: post #25

The counterargument: In Defence of the Single Page Application: https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defenc...

Sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from reality.

https://medium.com/luminasticity/on-the-triumph-of-satire-fa...

"Satire isn’t dead.

Satire won.

This is what it looks like from inside, looking out. "

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#154

Post by whstl »

swiftcoder wrote: post #30
hyperhello wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do a bad job with any tool but you cannot do a good job with any tool.

This is patently untrue, give a craftsman terrible tools, and they'll still produce a decent end result. That said, defaults matter, and astro is going to be significantly more friendly out-of-the-box to low-end clients

> give a craftsman terrible tools, and they'll still produce a decent end result

This is an absurd statement. Just because something is a proverb, doesn't mean it's automatically true for all cases.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#156

Post by genewitch »

Ruarl wrote: post #110
nonethewiser wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if they dont, where is the disrespect? They dont know what a megabyte is, they dont feel a slow page load. Where is the disrespect? React is too heavy weight for a lot of things. But it's ridiculous to call it disrespectful.

If Rick Rubin could take a tape to his car to listen to his mixes, your product people can try their websites on £20 phones from Tesco. They can ask to sit in on user tests with minority groups. Extending your knowledge like this is trivial, but rarely done.

May i ask why, specifically, Rick Rubin? I don't know who that is, but whenever we finished mastering a new song, we had a series of "systems" we listened to it on. We went out to my dad's work van and listened there. We called up our friend with a street-comp sound system in his car, and listened in there (neighbors must have loved us!), and then a "cheap" boombox with large-ish speakers but cheap.

if it sounded "clean" on all 3, without the bass muffling everything, and the highs not hurting the eardrums, we called it "good" and released.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#157

Post by bryanrasmussen »

wmanley wrote: post #25

The counterargument: In Defence of the Single Page Application: https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defenc...

Like most defenses of Single Page Applications it managed to make me angry, at least at first.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#158

Post by nunez »

genewitch wrote: post #144
aidanbeck wrote: post #94

I was going to comment on the Terence Eden excerpt quoted by the author about the woman researching housing benefits on an old PSP browser, when I noticed that you (the OP) are Terence himself. It's strikingly powerful, and a reminder of the duty we have in building our infrastructure. > Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It is fri…

just use firefox with an adblocker like adnauseam and a fairly decent chunk of the internet stops working, including chase.com and several other massive corp sites. I can't imagine trying to use links/lynx or a browser with less market share than FF that isn't based on chromium.

Chase works with ad blockers, though.

It doesn't work if you disable JavaScript...but it wasn't always this way!

They had a mobile version of their online banking service at https://m.chase.com that was EXTREMELY FAST and did 85% of what you need to do in an online banking portal (check balances, transfer funds). They scrapped it when they moved to their current bloated monstrosity of the portal that they have today.

It was a big reason why I moved to a credit union (who outsources their online banking services to Alkami, which maintains a very tight portal and supports 2FA AND passkeys!).

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#159

Post by genewitch »

pphysch wrote: post #147
thesuitonym wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, in English, Chai does not mean tea, it means a specific flavor of tea. If you don't believe me, try ordering some Earl Grey Chai, see what happens.

Sure, but "chai tea" is still redundant. I have never used that term and ordered chai in many places without confusion.

it's redundant at a place that serves chai, but it isn't redundant at a place that does not serve chai, because you're skipping the "what is chai" question from whoever you're querying.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#160

Post by breakwaterlabs »

motoboi wrote: post #132

Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…

> Old people don't have that because they

Aren't insane.

When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works? What happened to the old days of Xerox PARC's HCI studies putting the user first? The computer is in service of the user, not the other way around!

If I need to build a mental turing machine to understand your application, it is a bad application. It is rather the engineer's job to build a mental model of the user and their needs, and if you can't do that you should not call yourself a software engineer.

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