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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

#581

Post by inigyou »

z3t4 wrote: post #443
inigyou wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you give the project to a bunch of junior devs the stack is necessarily decided by one or more of them since there's nobody else to decide it...

The tech stack is almost always decided by someone in leadership that has no developer experience. Or by the consultant company that will chose the most complicated and difficult to maintain stack because then they can invoice more and will win all future contracts. The trick is to hire someone that is not corrupted by money, someone like the author of this post, who cares more for the users then how much he gets pai…

Not in my experience. If they're throwing it to a group of junior devs they're throwing it to a group of junior devs.

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

#582

Post by jimbokun »

mrweasel wrote: post #562
jimbokun wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you store the SQLite database files? What is your strategy for partitioning your data into SQLite files? One per user or…?

> Where do you store the SQLite database files? What? On the server, where else would you put it?

You only have one server?

Then that approach will work. If you need to scale beyond that, you need some way to route the request to the server with the right data. And what if a request needs data that was stored on two different servers?

Those are the kinds of questions I had in mind.

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

#583

Post by 6510 »

rescbr wrote: post #404
6510 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use to have an old pentium 2 computer for testing websites. Sometimes you cant make things fast enough for the old box. A fun trick is/was to have elm.textContent="loading images" between each "heavy" section, all targeting the same elm. If the computer, network or server is truly extremely slow you will get a nice message at the top describing what they are waiting for. On a normal slow computer you won't see the…

Oooh! Like a status bar! shit, I'm too old to remember those...

haha right, I forgot the word for it.

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

#584

Post by antasvara »

Telaneo wrote: post #564
antasvara wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the relationship people are seeing is "80 year old can't fill out my form, must be because they can't use a computer." But international surveys like PIAAC [0] indicate that adaptive problem solving is the real problem. 30 percent of adults are at or below Level 1; I've copied and pasted what that level represents below: > Adults at this level are able to understand simple problems and develop and implement s…

I'm curious how this lines up with US literacy rates. Is the group of people who can't navigate a two page online form the same as the one have reading comprehension skills on a 5th grade level or lower? Or do they at least largely overlap? In my experience they do, but it'd be nice to have confirmation. I got taught in school to check whether or not the piece of paper we got with the test on it had something on both…

Your intuition is largely correct. For any given level of adaptive problem solver, approximately 55% of those people share the same literacy level (i.e. a Level 1 adaptive problem solver is also a Level 1 for literacy around 55% of the time). 35% have a reading level that's 1 up from their problem solving ability, and around 10% have a literacy level 1 below their problem solving ability.

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

#585

Post by slightlyoff »

inigyou wrote: post #454
arcanemachiner wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old != oldest They are referring to this: https://us-east-1-shared-usea1-02.graphassets.com/cluuijofv0...

> single-core scores > only goes back to 2015

This data is from a series I publish; the latest update is here and includes multi-core scores:

https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...

Mobile devices rarely last beyond the 5 year mark, although the age span has been increasing in the past several years and the resale market is booming thanks to inflation, geopolitical instability, and a global cost-of-living crisis.

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

#586

Post by slightlyoff »

aquariusDue wrote: post #452
arcanemachiner wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old != oldest They are referring to this: https://us-east-1-shared-usea1-02.graphassets.com/cluuijofv0...

Oh, I know it's not the point but I find it a bit disingenuous going from iPhone base model to the Pro in the last 3 years and still comparing to the base model Samsung S series. Though maybe I'm missing something non obvious. But yeah, generally I've seen a better experience buying used phones (in good condition) instead of budget/cheap new ones.

The data is from my blog series, the latest installment of which is here:

https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...

The top two lines are the fastest devices available in the iOS and Android ecosystems each year, and when using Samsung S-series devices, I have made sure to pick the faster of the Qualcomm vs. Samsung Semi parts (both are used historically, but Qualcomm is most prevalent in the US). As explained in the piece, the bottom two lines are taken from representative devices in the mid-range and low-end price categories. There's wild variation in those market segments due to short-run discounting, and the most meaningful uplift in CPU speeds has coincided with 5G radios (for obvious signal-processing reasons). Because the lowest-priced segment doesn't yet feature 5G, those processors have remained stubbornly slow, even if they get cheaper every year.

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

#587

Post by sethammons »

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #396
sethammons wrote: post #112

> When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. Yeah, reminds me of the b52 story re holes in wings on the planes that made it back from missions, leading them down the wrong path of strengthening wings…

Certainly not the b52, which arrived after the end of WWII…

whoops, yeah. Likely b17. My brain subbed "bomber" for the more prominent bomber in my head.

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

#588

Post by ksec »

The industry as a whole stopped caring about users. They cared about their resume or CV. Resume Driven development.

They have also either completely forgotten or for newer devs never learned anything about HTML / non JS front end development. Hence "but that’s a lot more work for us." Somewhere along the line HTML and CSS became Assembly. They somehow became dark magic.

For real users, no one cares about the tech being used. And most of the so called advantage provided by JS front end sites are at best marginal and realistically speaking imaginary unless you are Google Earth or Online photoshop / spreadsheets.

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

#589

Post by shakna »

inigyou wrote: post #148
paytonjjones wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something but aren't PWAs pretty dead-simple on both iOS and Android? Maybe it's the "reliable storage" part that's the gap?

I thought I read that one or both of them removed or heavily restricted PWA support to funnel more apps to their 30%-taking app store.

iOS was PWA-only to begin with, but at the same time, OS X didn't support them at all. It was a messy time, but has since changed. [0]

[0] https://github.com/mdn/content/issues/32969

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

#590

Post by aiisjustanif »

jessyco wrote: post #325
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.

In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you have some kind of association behind it; the title holds meaning including partially accountability. Something that is lacking in the tech world. I'm not saying I want to live in that world but also I worked hard for the knowledge I have starting in the IE days of web dev; it was hard earned experience making things work across the web without loosing performan…

Always be a doubled edged sword, why would a startup with an optional product like a fitness tracking app ever rise to level of regulation that requires developers that are beholden to associations to uphold some level of accountability on developers.

A lot of products don’t come close to rising to the level of a government website, industrial control systems, financial transactions, etc. in terms of needing structure accountability.

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