The practical lesson here is, as always: be extremely wealthy.
No matter what you do, people will think it is profoundly smart.
No matter what you do, people will think it is profoundly smart.
it feels a bit naive to shrug this off as "elite wealthy people getting their ego boosted". where are the articles praising Jeff Bezos' "expeditions" website[0], or Bill Gates' personal blog[1]?
Disclaimer: I’m a yak shaver, I’ll waste immense time on “perfecting“ something irrelevant.
Have you looked at sec.gov?
And looking at sec.gov right now looks nothing like a 90s website. It has clean graphics, its responsive, etc. Not exactly sure how it looks like it hasn't been updated from the 90s.
Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of unadorned personal websites (including that of yours truly), especially in academic circles, or websites of old-school software projects look just like this masterpiece.
Whereas with BH, they can be sure that this page gets used as BH has a wide net of consumers that'd need to leverage this site. If this design was a major blocked to business effectivity, BH has enough money to change it. The fact that they haven't suggests it's at least good enough.
Also, your argument that any company with enough money to fix a dysfunctional website must have a good enough website is kinda laughable.
https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about.html
This is for shareholders etc. Suppose you give that page + the berkshire page to a group of shareholders. I’d bet they can find what they need faster on berkshire’s site. And it loads damned fast. Scotia’s is bloated.
Moreover, Berkshire shareholders are wealthy. Berkshire has a large portfolio, but Geico is the one product pretty much all of them need (car insurance). There’s a highly visible geico add with a clear call to action right on the home page. That’s no accident (Buffett also mentions it constantly at shareholder meetings and in his popular letters)
I genuinely think the Berkshire site is better suited for its purpose than 95% of corporate relations pages.
I'm obviously biased in this interpretation, because I tend to favour low-bandwidth version of websites as much as I can, such as using the no-javascript version of facebook (m.facebook.com) where there is much less actual interaction than facebook wants, or using an alternate twitter client (nitter.net) because I just want to read the content, not wait for javascript to load and execute if I'm not even going to interact. Just look at Hacker News: isn't that supposed to be laughable in 2020's web design world ? And yet we're all using it because, beyond being centered on content, it's _fast_
The side effect of aiming for no javascript is that the content is more easily reachable: there's no need to wander into endless menus and animations that bring no value, because everything is there already. I feel it's a lesson that more designers should apply.
So yeah, doing a 90s' style website is not necessary to have a fast website, but it's impossible to have a slow website. But it's true that a very minimum amount of CSS can totally change the look of your site without being bloated: see for example the Best Motherfucking Website (https://bestmotherfucking.website/)
But I still think the post you're responding to is too cynical (shocking on HN, I know). One author on one website praised Berkshire Hathaway's website. So what? Plenty of people on plenty of other websites praise mediocre things created by non-rich people all the time.
If users leave your site because of how it looks, then you’re not serving them. If users go to your site in spite of not looking terribly good, then you’re providing a valuable service (and that service is not “web design”).
Also, Craiglist has evolved their site quite a bit and at this point their "design" is no longer a matter of simplicity, but essentially a visual aesthetic that they maintain as a matter of branding and culture, kind of like Amazon giving people door-desks long after it became cheaper for them to just buy regular office furniture in bulk.
It reminds me of a national adverts website over here, Marktplaats; it used to be a very 90's, table-driven lists of links kind of deal with a fugly brown background. But it took off nevertheless, and became a major business that was eventually taken over by Ebay (in 2004). It's very slowly changed its front-end to a more modern facing one. But they made sure to do it slowly. Evolution rather than revolution.
Just seems like circular logic.
I've noticed that certain people can say nearly anything and people will gush all over it, even when it's clearly foolish or someone else said the same thing just 10 minutes previous.
That's what happens when you make financial success equivalent to wisdom.
Simple and straightforward is best when the information is far more valuable than anything else.
I think this is more a case that extreme wealth and prestige has lessened the pressure to follow what are arguably dumb trends.
Berkshire Hathaway's website is smart (in relative terms), but not because Berkshire Hathaway is smart.