A thousand times yes. One word: " Enshittification" captures what has become of the web.
Web designs are getting too complicated
71–80 of 83 posts
Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#72There's a happy medium here. Yeah, the Awwwards site the author linked to showcases excesses, but isn't that the point? Those sites are designed to be excessive.
I'm mindful of performance on the sites I make but I also don't want the entire internet to prioritize shopping basket conversions. Some whimsy can be good.
Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#73Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s. Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
Well it’s easier to get you hooked and show you more and better targeted ads if you get the app. There’s a value add, it’s just not for you, the user. It’s for Reddit and their customers (advertisers).
One reason I always refuse to get Apps and get pulled into the surveillance world.
Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#74The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine! I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.
I, for one, am happy that I'm no longer managing state across hundreds of independent jQuery values and making raw XHR calls to jsonp endpoints.
Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#75Websites today exist to sell things.
Awwwards websites are pretty much exclusively web design agency sites. These are selling the services of those agencies, which lean towards art direction, graphic design and video production. Nobody is hiring them to build the marketing website for Stripe, or Shopify or Astro or whatever else lies in the boring world of cookie-cutter SaaS sites.
There was a time when sites were created purely for artistic reasons and would get awards, which encouraged visitors to check those sites out. That era of the web has been over for at least 15 years, or roughly when Flash gave up the ghost. Since then, web design became about how fast it could get you to hit the "Sign Up / Buy / Subscribe" button. And it turns out, they're still very heavy bandwidth-wise, only instead of interesting interaction design, the heft comes from the JS frameworks and invisible analytics scripts running underneath the hood.
Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#76Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting . Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites…
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Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#77The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine! I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.
I agree with you on Tailwind, but React/Vue solve the problem of creating complex webapps. If you write HTML and modify DOM manually with JS, it only works for relatively simple projects. As soon as it becomes complex, it becomes hard to track which JS code changes what DOM.
Another thing is maintability. Working with single-file components with state management systems is just a pleasure.
Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is that CTOs don't care about animations, rounded corners, or what not - they care about metrics. These artsy bullshit layouts are suggested by design teams and the technical side either doesn't care/is content to delegate or there's someone at director level who wants to be the next Steve Jobs and empowers design. This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineer…
It's so funny to see an incompetent CTO thinking things like, as the example, animations, is just designers being designers. Go ahead and remove ChatGPT animations and make the user wait for the whole text to be ready without any feedback. Let me know how those metrics go.
Animations are not necessarily bullshit, but all of the sites in the linked list of rewards are. Sites which hijack scroll to do something else ("you scrolled down and watch the window in this picture of a house open up and reveal the next text block") are an example of something in vogue amongst designers which are harder to read, harder to navigate, and are just artsy bullshit.
Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#79Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s. Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
Reddit is one of those sad stories where some features are now only available on the mobile app and the endpoints on their API are not documented so you can't access them any other way.
Re: Web designs are getting too complicated
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, depending on the amount of content on the page astro + react is fine. Astro lets you output everything as static html so it doesn’t hurt your page scores I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
There should be no context change from not using React, unless one is a very junior programmer
o_O
Not sure what you were intending to say, but here's what I parsed when reading that post:
"There should be no context change from ".