This one is awesome http://www.wingsandwheels.com/wantads1.htm
Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
71–80 of 100 posts
Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#72The tutorial for using the website is awesome (and beautifully anti-american): http://www.lingscars.com/chat.php?domain=www.lingscars.com&l...
Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The automatic adjust option would be a crap default though. Just the process of Apache checking whether a page is static or dynamic means accepting the connection to begin with - by which point it would be too late to forward the connection to a sorry page if content is dynamic. It would also mean that connections end up stacking at a far greater rate as Apache is required to open each and every request just to ident…
Automatic dynamic tuning isn't an obvious choice[1], and isn't what I was suggesting, and I doubt it was what the parent great-grandparent was suggesting. I simply meant scaling parameters based on the hardware available and whatever else can be determined easily at configuration time. [1] Not going to come out and say it couldn't work, but I am skeptical for a good many reasons, some of which you've touched on.
Ahh yes. That could work. In fact I've often wondered why Apache didn't attempt a little of that (even just on the most rudimentary level; setting the concurrency of processes based on the number of CPU cores reported. But it wouldn't be hard to add a little more intelligence)
If that was what the parent comments referred to though, then it's still a moot point as Lin was isn't running the default tunings (if her 500 concurrent figure is to be believed), so the issue still falls back on her rather than Apache defaults (which is what this argument started over). Though I guess you could also argue that if Apache did some level of auto-tuning then Lin may not have felt obliged to tamper with the defaults.
Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#74Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a "Hacker site" hit them..
For some reason I just got a nostalgic warm-fuzzy over this. Not only the site's 1990s look, but that this kind of "misunderstanding" still happens.
Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#75Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#76Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a "Hacker site" hit them..
Sadly Lin is now blaming Hacker News for hacking her site with the intention of taking it offline - which is just retarded as: a) we're legitimate curious visitors (albeit not maybe not customers - but who's to say that some of us wouldn't be converted from window shoppers to buyers - that's kind of the point of websites after all) and b) her webserver set up to only allow for 500 concurrent connections. Which is jus…
What makes you think the site is "serious" now? She just doesn't know what Hacker News is, and can't be blamed for that. She just knows that some self-proclaimed "hackers" brought her site down with lots of traffic.
The ASCII art in the source code is awesome, BTW.
Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#77Yeah. Flat designs are boring -- I never end up on the floor, convulsing, when I scroll through a flat website.
Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#78A must watch - http://www.besquare.me/session/the-future-of-digital-marketi...
Ling's got some solid points to make. For example, the silly things she does on her site builds trust with her customers because her customers get more of a glimpse into her personality compared to other dealerships. Trust converts more than pretty, or sensible, visual design.
It's taking branding in a different direction than what we normally consider and I think it's worth while to think outside the box most of us put ourselves in when considering how to maximize conversions. I don't know if what Ling's doing is optimal, but it definitely sheds light on other approaches that are sometimes ignored.
Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#79Re: Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
#80MSY, a popular computer parts store in Australia, has always had a pretty dodgy-looking website. http://msy.com.au/
Might be something like this http://www.mtechlaptops.com/indexofnotebooks.htm who actually tell you why that is; http://www.mtechlaptops.com/ugly_web_site.htm .
Besides that; the co-founder (from Australia) of one of the companies I built and sold successfully, was always quite focused on making 'ugly' designs. We did split-testing with pixel perfect, really professional designs versus this 1995, quite ugly 'old' stuff and every time the ugly design won at conversions. This is the consumer space we were in. We tested many times it the 'ugly' design always won.
Maybe times have changed (this is about 5 years ago), but it always makes a bit suspicious of that cry for the perfect design while it actually, again, at least then, had a averse effect. I still know of a few cases where the owner swears by amateur and ugly. The theory apparently is that a lot of people don't trust slick and believe they will be screwed somehow.
Edit: another one I just thought off; marktplaats.nl (Dutch Ebay and owned by Ebay since 2004) has looked like this; http://web.archive.org/web/19991105082644/http://www.marktpl... for a very long time. Everyone in the web design business thought it was horrible in many ways, but consumers refused to use anything else, including ebay.nl. They hardly touched the design until recently and it is still clear that they didn't want to piss the users off too much.