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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

#21

Post by robofanatic »

tootie wrote: post #9

I was a little confused by "doubled our users" since that's more about inbound traffic than site experience. I guess it's really shorthand for "halved form abandonment" which is still pretty great.

may be he meant, doubled our users who actually submitted the form

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

#23

Post by black6 »

rafram wrote: post #16
romanovcode wrote: post #14

[flagged]

No we don't. There are lots of countries with software outsourcing industries, and contractors in any country can be good or bad. Would you rather have a top IIT graduate, or someone who took a year of programming classes at a community college in Fresno?

Considering the rampant fraud in a certain country's university system, give me local CC graduates.

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

#24

Post by jorisw »

ai_slop_hater wrote: post #22
ungreased0675 wrote: post #18

Empathy and respect for users is what product managers should be doing. Shipping tens of megabytes per web page is impolite, if not outright disrespectful to users.

They don't know what a megabyte is

They feel the slowness of the page load

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

#26

Post by brianwmunz »

Maybe this is heretical in today's AI hype climate but...weirdly due to the rise of AI, then AI-slop polluting everything, a lot of old fundamentals are coming back. Clear, well-structured, descriptive content on a well-built page has a better shot of being picked up for SEO/AEO/whatever which are the same best practices from 2005. A lot of these tips and tricks and hacks just aren't going to move the needle as much anymore imo.

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

#28

Post by adjejmxbdjdn »

entropichorse wrote: post #3

People who built a crappy website using React are just as likely to build a crappy website using Astro, HTML-first approach or any other technology

True. Crappy developers will build crappy websites irrespective of the tech.

The article is clearly aimed at non crappy developers or developers who want to do better for their users.

And it provides an anecdotal experience where an HTML first option developed by a good developer was far superior to what a JS necessary option would have been, given the user base of this application.

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

#29

Post by jorisw »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #27
jorisw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They feel the slowness of the page load

Not on their iPhones operating over 5G or the corporate WiFi.

You don't think there's any palpable difference as long as the connection is any good?

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

#30

Post by swiftcoder »

hyperhello wrote: post #8
entropichorse wrote: post #3

People who built a crappy website using React are just as likely to build a crappy website using Astro, HTML-first approach or any other technology

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
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