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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Genuinly nice and efficient (fast to load and scroll) website design.

Of course looking at the HTML code removes the illusion of sleek hand coding, instead a now dated proprietery program seems to have been used.

But still better than a slow page involving 100 JS frameworks to display a single article :)

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The page weighs in at almost 9 megabytes. How is that efficient and fast to load? Lazy loading images would be a small and needed improvement - but of course it would require the horrible jaava skript to be used, which must be avoided at all costs.

I don't understand how lazy loading could help here. The images are all behind hyperlinks, and their display sizes are all hardcoded into the HTML. There is nothing preventing the browser from completing the page layout immediately and backfilling the images as the load.

That is not to say the page is well-designed or pretty - it is hideous. But lazy loading would make it strictly worse by adding js parse+eval latency on top of the loading time for the images.

Baffled by the ugly=better trend on HN and elsewhere. The linked site scores low in readability and overall UX, this "still better than a ReactJS site" mentality has to die.

Elaborate on the "low in readability and overall UX". It loaded fast, and didn't use a cpu intensive client side animation that doesn't add to readability. It's not a paragon of design, but it was refreshing to have a single page of text that didn't download a few mbs in libraries and css, have constant tracking requests, or have animations or visualization that didn't add to my understanding of the content.

> Elaborate...

- Arbitrarily changing text effects/color/padding.

- Not responsive. On my laptop, I have to scroll left/right to see all pics

- Nav is below the fold, I have to scroll down to see it.

- Broken text hover effects

Sure, it doesn't track you or download 100 js files, but you can't score a site based on what it doesn't have.

> it doesn't track you or download 100 js files, but you can't score a site based on what it doesn't have.

Well judging by the positive reaction by a non-negligible number of people, the lack of javascript bloat may be something valued by many on this site.

Your points are well taken. It's not a well designed site, but to play devil's advocate I hardly noticed the need to scroll right (focus was on text) and didn't notice the text hover effect issue. Nav being below fold was largely immaterial because more information of interest was on the single page.

I have a good internet line and a fast computer but the images took pretty long to load, all the while making the website hard to use. So I don't really observe the same behaviour as you.

Looks like some images are higher resolution than displayed, that makes them slower to load I guess, but on the bright side one can right click and "view image" to see the stalactites in larger glory :)

Yes, so that seems in line with old school website building as well ;). There could have been smaller images that linked to bigger ones.

All I mean to say that old web technology is not always better. While I agree with your original comment with regards to 'modern' web tech often venturing deep into the field of over-engineering.

Are you looking at the same site as everyone else? Try going to the rest of the http://arkhaven.org/ site? Thd web design combines the worst of late nineties fonts, javascript and design. And as for the content...! Fundamentalist christian prepper mystical conspiracy minded internet kookery on the high end of the scale o_O

2/10 - Would not recommend emulating in next side project

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