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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

#261

Post by Maken »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #179
Hard_Space wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. I think this is a bit outdated. I'll be 60 in a month, and have been practicing and writing about machine learning, for money, for a straight 10 years now; and I was a young man (and a full stack developer) during the digital revolution. If anything, GenX had to work harder to get into these brittle emerging…

> practicing and writing about machine learning ... full stack developer ... digital revolution. my mum, a boomer now in her 70s, would have no bloody clue what you're talking about. she used to work helping out a guy who was doing punchcard programming back when she was young. she ain't dumb. if i broke it down into normal human english words, she'd probably get a sort of idea (or at least nod along to humour me). i…

To be fair, the UI randomly changing in every update is a pain point for people of any age.

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

#263

Post by Telaneo »

I'm curious how many web issues can be solved by having the people responsible for the relevant sites only be allowed to use them on a Windows 11 machine with only 4 GB of RAM using Firefox with the network throttled to 3G speeds.

Assuming the processor isn't horrible, I can still browse plenty of sites with those specs without much issue, and on the sites that do require more, it's very rarely because the sites actually needs it (i.e. I'm not running Windows XP in a VM in the browser or something). It could just be normal HTML and CSS and normal forms, sprinkled with some light JS to help out a bit. But the amount of sites made with that level of care and attention are sadly rare, since the people responsible rarely feel the pain or have the empathy to fix the problem.

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

#264

Post by yawaramin »

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.

Doubling conversions, in digital marketing-speak. Marketing firms probably give out fat bonuses for this kind of result.

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

#265

Post by atoav »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #257
jmye wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was... SHTML? that allowed for server includes. My recollection from... 25ish years ago was that it was generally quite well supported and worked quite well (and was dead simple to implement). Not sure why, if that was the issue, the fix didn't quite catch on (but it's totally possible I'm mis-remembering the state of browser support).

Server-side includes worked fine but weren't enabled by default in any of the mainstream web servers. I think the lack of default-enabled status hampered their adoption. Joe User couldn't just FTP a bunch of ".shtml" files up to their shared web space and expect it to work right. I certainly used the heck out of them in the late 90s, though. It would have been very cool if HTML had been created with the ability to do…

[delayed]

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

#266

Post by p-t »

atoav wrote: post #180
OskarS wrote: post #165

As a non-web dev, I have a question about this part: > There was a sad coda; as is the way of contract work, I moved on. I explained what I had built to my replacement, that it always worked even without javascript. He was appalled and said, “but that’s a lot more work for us.” Why is it more work? The approach described in the article seems honestly reasonably simple: just write the standard components for the form,…

By this point people don't appear to have any real clue how to write HTML anymore. Writing semantic HTML isn't significantly harder than say writing Markdown. You copy some HTMl skeleton and you literally just stack your elements into the body. I managed to do that as a 13 year old on MySpace without any deep instruction. Sure you have to close elements as well so the syntax is slightly harder than markdown, but that…

yeah editing all the footers and navigation parts in html is too annoying to me so i've resorted for my websites to just a back button to a page that has links to everything else lmao

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

#267

Post by pier25 »

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.

> Shipping tens of megabytes per web page is impolite, if not outright disrespectful to users.

You're being generous with what I would consider negligence.

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

#268

Post by luckylion »

yesco wrote: post #243
concinds wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.

I see no reason not to be empathetic. The frustration is fair, but it's aimed at the wrong layer. These people were guided into this spot by bootcamps and curricula that start at React and never go down the stack. My experience was the reverse. I learned HTML and CSS first, then Rails in college to serve templated pages. I understood the client/server boundary fine as a concept, what I couldn't see was where it actua…

Are you sympathetic to a doctor who specialized in surgery and now always recommends surgery, even for a common cold? Or would you say they are in the wrong job, if they are anywhere but surgery?

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

#269

Post by wild_egg »

faangguyindia wrote: post #50

Most of my apps are now simply HTMX + Go + SQLite. I've found it's enough for most projects. One of my sites is image heavy and serves 10 TB of traffic per month. For this, I use the following setup: 1. S3 (I wanted reliable data storage) 2. In front of it, I have Cloudflare (with Tiered Cache enabled, which makes POPs prefer pulling from Cloudflare rather than the origin). I've set rules to cache everything on both…

On the mobile point, there is https://github.com/instawork/hyperview

Your Go server can have endpoints that render XML instead of HTML and basically get the same server-driven experience of your HTMX site. Fully skips the need for the app review process since you're not updating the actual client app code to make UI changes.

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

#270

Post by yawaramin »

regnull wrote: post #150

> When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. I don't want to be that guy, but the title is misleading. The number of users completing the form doubled.

No, it's actually people. FTA: 'My client was a utility company, and they had a big problem. To apply for their services, customers could either use an old ASP form on the website...'

Ie customers of the utility company were completing the form, not random users from the internet.

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