I work for a design company and It pains me a lot of the time to create bloated garbage templates for our users that simply "look nice". It is physically painful to be on the developing end of website design and see how terrible things are getting every day.
What are some good websites that Holla Forums finds not only well designed, but also efficient. I have a hard time actually finding websites that translate well into modern day web using older web 2.0 methodologies. Are there any good baseline websites that look nice in the modern day and keep to efficient utilitarian practices?
Every single imageboard that cloned its interface from the world2ch imageboard. AKA 4chan and Holla Forums. Its a basic design that has changed very little since 2003, it just werkz, and for some reason every other year we get someone trying to re-invent the wheel and fail miserably (c. InfinityNext)
Ethan Rivera
the bloated shit is only thought of as looking good because its less straightforward. harder t make and full of effects. by these standards anything that "looks nice" will be bloated, because aesthetics are being judged on moronic criteria that invent work, complexity, and burden where there need be none. theres nothing you can do if you work at a design company. If companies stopped thinking they needed their websites to look "modern"(bloated and loaded with stupid effects) and users stopped thinking anything that wasnt "modern" as such looked "outdated", your company would stop being hired and you'd be out of a job.
*chans only get a pass because they've been around in the same form so long and even then faggots on /g/ make retarded userscripts and CSS to make them look like a C- design class project.
Adrian Sanchez
design rarely really needs tons of braindead javascript codez. most people just don't know how to do it with only CSS. also, inefficiency also comes from third party included shit like analytics and whatnot.
Robert Baker
This makes me wonder if web users even care about whether a page is a bloated mess of stuff flying in. I don't think I have ever heard anyone say "I wish I would have to scroll over five screens instead of having all important information on one or two screens". I think this whole trend of making bloated web pages (like gohugo.io/) is just hipster idiots jerking each other off. I think the GNU Guile web page is pretty nice and modern and still well functional: gnu.org/software/guile/
Ayden James
It is. The problem is is that it is now all looks over function, this also applies to programs or GUI's. People rather have a shitty bloated image slide thingy that uses a lot of resources than a slider that just slides. I'm glad I dont do web development anymore.
All talent is gone and news its all faggots using premade javascript bullshit that's full of tracking shit and code that isn't needed.
Cameron Nelson
you're absolutely right. normies dont want their phones/laptops to lag or their phones data usage to spike from the MB of JS. They'd also probably like it better if they could get the information they'd want immediately and easily instead of going through four enormous slideshow panes because the website is designed to act like a slideshow, because while that wouldnt be cool if it was a slideshow, its cool when its a website! I dont think they're even particularly impressed by most website designs. My 'ooh shiny' instinct doesn't kick in unless its novel, which most bloated websites aren't. 'hipster idiots jerking each other off' is one way of putting it, but remember people pay these people to do it, and theyd be out of work if they didnt. so its also about money.
The bloat problem is due to manufactured need though. old websites are objectively no worse than modern ones. im not a nostalgiafag saying they're necessarily good, there are well designed old websites and poorly designed old websites. the mediocre to bad ones really arent much worse than the mediocre to bad modern ones though.
Christopher Bennett
Neocities seems to house some websites that are not trashy mobileshit. You might find something there, who knows? neocities.org/browse
"""""Modern""""" eye-cancer-inducing material design makes me unironically want shit like this to become a thing again. geocities90s.neocities.org
Kayden Carter
Start using Lynx to browse random websites. The ones that look ok in Lynx are well designed. In the 90's (even early 00's), most sites looked ok in Lynx. Basically the dude who made "thisisamotherfuckingwebsite" page had the right idea, but you don't have to be as spartan as that.
Austin Powell
Btw, I forgot to mention two things. Up until maybe 10 years ago, it was pretty common for webmasters/developers to test their shit in Lynx. Not everyone did that, but the good ones did, the ones who knew wtf they were doing. Obviously in the early days most pages would have worked in Lynx regardless, since the web standards had not yet been completely subverted by Microsoft, Mozilla, Google... Lynx is text only but it can spawn external viewer for images or other media, based on MIME types. For example, my ~/.mailcap has these entries:
I've been learning web design from scratch for the past couple months now. Am I missing anything that would make my life a lot easier by avoiding libraries like Droopal, Joomla, Wordpress, Bootstrap, etc?
Zachary Martinez
make sure you know the semantic meaning of each html tag if you need something fancy use css use javascript only and only if you can't do it in css
Jason Turner
It is a bad idea to purposely not learn frameworks. At the very least try to learn node.js and angular.js wordpress is very easy and bootstrap, while a bit more, isn't typically that hard.
THIS. You can tell the difference between pajeet tier web development and actual human work with this. Semantic html done well makes your life so much easier. If you follow semantics you can technically scrap your whole js/css shit and your website will still be functional.
Blake Harris
I was recently marveling at how The Pirate Bay is from a by-gone era of design, but is very functional an pleasing. suckless.org is also pretty good AFAICT.
Andrew Sanders
Apparently, the concept of jumping to the top/bottom of a page with Home/End keys is lost on mobileshit.
Leo Sanders
Scrolling to the top on mobile is only 1 move, which take much less effort to move your forearm to the Home key (for most people who browse with a mouse).
Maybe 2 moves for very long pages (one to display scrollbar and one to drag it to the top).
I use mobile browser a lot, and i find those nav bars really annoying. Especially because most of them don't even work without js.
Charles Cooper
Here you go user
My last suggestion will probably get shit on by Holla Forums but if you're just starting out this is the way to go. Once you have a good understanding of these things you'll be able to judge if a framework is worth using. Most are far too bloated for your needs and only remain popular because people don't really learn anymore they just copy/paste shit until it works in one browser and call it a day.
Oh I forgot, learn about storing data. Flat files are fine when you're starting out but at some point you're going to want to learn something like PostgreSQL.
Ryder Rogers
Well normalfags are not really expected to spend an ounce of their goldfish tier attention span (ugh me hav too scrool ALL DA WEY 2 DA TOP BOOOOORIN :X); hence those infernal mobile memes: flat sterile layout, fixed bars, hamburger menus, social media garbage, superfluous amount of ads/videos/fonts/cancerscript and many other chickenshit minimalism tripes web designers are paid to do.
idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Mason Brooks
Literally everything you ever do with web design and websites is a hack duct-tape jerry-nigger-rigged aggregation of disparate frameworks and libraries extending HTML, CSS, and themselves recursively because HTML doesn't have any decent fucking way to veritcally center one fucking inside of a parent without hard-coding the sizes and using absolute positioning.
Nathan Hughes
...
Jeremiah Green
>because HTML doesn't have any decent fucking way to veritcally center one fucking inside of a parent without hard-coding the sizes and using absolute positioning. HTML is for content only. What you want should be done in CSS using the Flexbox features. Seriously, Flexbox solves so many problems that had to be done with horrible hacks in the past.
Landon Roberts
Now they are pushing the grid layout in CSS, which is essentially but with CSS's syntax Apparently flexbox wasn't good enough
Levi Cook
flexible box and css grid are different. sometimes you can solve the same problems with them, but they're mostly complimentary.
Christopher Gray
also, i used flexbox in a new site for a non profit recently, I straight up told them I'm not using my time to support below IE10, and aside from a few bugs in IE10-IE11 with edge mode, it was a total lifesaver. the css is probably more complicated than it needs to be, using flexbox for the entire layout, but it really does solve problems that would be a real bitch. flow-root being standardized means that float/clearfix is obsolete too. As soon as attr() for anything besides content is implemented in browsers, CSS will be bretty good.
Jacob Martin
was never meant for layout, it fucks up the semantics and does not scale well on smaller screens (i.e. mobile phones). Using was just a hack that was popular because it was quick and dirty rather than being just plain dirty. Flexbox is not really meant for grid layout either, it is meant to flexibly scale and position objects inside containers.
Take for example some sort of "product card" in a store: you have a surface containing an image, some text, a price tag and a button that takes you to that item. The text might have different length per product, resulting in different sizes for the cards, but you want all cards to have the same height. You also want to change the order of items in a card depending on the output device (e.g. put the image before the title on a desktop, but after the title on a phone, and after the description in semantics). Flexbox allows you to achieve uniform layout across all cards very simply. See the example here: w3.org/TR/css-flexbox-1/#overview
The grid feature is different, it is specifically for laying out documents in a grid fashion. You can use Flexbox for that, and at the moment it's the best option, but a specialised solution will allow you to do things in a cleaner way.
