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Comment by azharcs | Hacker News Reader

Hey, Do you hate CSS ;-) When I visited your website, I actually checked my web developer toolbar to see if CSS is disabled.

Can I design tarsnap and provide you a CSS template.

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I don't particularly like CSS, but I do use it. I believe in separation of content and presentation, though, so I want the page to be readable without CSS. While the page is somewhat ugly, I think the minimalism suits the service.

That said, if someone sends me a redesigned page, I'll certainly look at it. :-)

Sure, I am on it. Give me a week and I will have something to show.

It just goes to show that a pretty landing page is not all that necessary. Functionality and usefulness are more important than web 2.0 glitz and glamor. You think tarsnap's website is ugly now? You should have seen it at the beginning.

I wish more HN startups would realize that. Almost all of the 'review my startup' posts are just a single page with an email signup form you fill out to be notified when the app will be ready.

You should have seen it at the beginning.

To be fair, at the beginning it didn't claim to be a website -- it just said "there will be a website here later, meanwhile go read these blog posts about tarsnap".

I went to the site to see what you meant, and figured initially I had gone to the wrong site, because I saw some modern-looking thing with floating divs and whatnot. ;-) When you implied it was pretty old-school I was expecting the design to look like, say, this: http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/

Hah! tptacek: are you adding this to your list of data points?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639443

I like Tarsnap's design. It's easy to tell what's going on and there's no eye-candy to get in the way. The lack of design is old-school in a pleasing way.

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