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Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

I know it's not really the point here, but it's nice to see a GNU project with a decent home-page. It's clear, presentable, and modern. (And of course it's not a JavaScript horror-show, but we'd never see that from a GNU project.)

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You say that, but I feel like it's a bit of a case of 'dress for the job you want'. Having a modern-ish looking site just gives off some signals like 'this is maintained', 'this has been deemed to still have utility in 2020' and 'the developer has some awareness of current UX'.

It doesn't need to be flashy. Just a nice font, a header, centre justification, some spacing, a paragraph explaining what the thing is, a nice logo, maybe some screenshots or a link to the docs and a download link.

GNU Lightning has a rather spartan website like you describe: https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/

That's pretty good! I think the only change I would make would be to swap out the serif font for a sans-serif font and that would be my ideal.

It displays as sans-serif on my machine with GNU-Icecat.

Ah I might be seeing a fallback font then.

I had this thought recently--is there a class of website where being being unstylish and looking like it came out of an earlier era of web design gives the site more credibility?

You might be right, like *nix utilities that have been around forever? Perhaps https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ is such a page? Staid, having a sense of permanence, what in Britain we describe as "part of the woodwork" (something that's been around so long, and is dependable, like the very structure of a building).

Sure, sites like Pinboard, SourceHut, and of course HackerNews, that appeal to the bloat-averse traditionalists who believe web pages should be lightweight.

It's not about aiming for an ugly UI, it's about getting out of the way and presenting a clean, simple, fast, functional page.

The designation brutalist web design has gained some traction. (I would have linked to an article on this, but ironically the page I found was offensively spam-ridden.)

How about emacs homepage? It's been redesigned recently if I remember correctly.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

Nice. My one complaint is that the text contrast seems a little lower than it could be. The text should be a true (0,0,0) black.

Only old people need full contrast. Low contrast text signifies hip youthfulness, which is important in any technology solutions :-/

The GNU Emacs website is similarly well done [0].

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

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