Godly – Astronomically good web design inspiration
godly.website
godly.website
I used to have a number of good ones added to my RSS reader, but they have slowly cease to update. I could google for inspiration sites like that, but I know google will only give me listicle SEO spam.
(I learned about this here on HN If I recall correctly)
"Most directories tend to put emphasis on shiny and showy hyper-animated web experiments. Unfortunately, many of these projects fail when criteria like performance, mobile, usability, and accessibility are considered. It’s hard to find one single resource on the internet that would combine both the technological excellence and highly polished design in ecommerce space. The Headless Club started as an internal agency tool to foster ecommerce best-practices across our development team. Now we’re sharing our findings with you."
Disclaimer: I'm the co-author (with folks from commerce-ui.com agency). We'll soon make it not specific to headless but to all e-commerce stores.
Is that like having an eComm shop built atop Shopify?
I'm with you. 98% of these lists are worthless for inspiration because they're mostly at student portfolio pieces or mock ups.
Show me some good accessible, fast, commercial designs that I can be inspired by and learn from, not some design agency's 3D spinning radishes blocking the text.
Bonus points if they manage to work in display advertising in a tasteful way.
https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/7-practical-tips-for-cheat...
A good number of these are aimed at developers, meaning I'm in their target market. So I'm going to state my opinion, knowing full well that these tactics are super prevalent which means presumably they work and I may well be an outlier. But I hope I'm not... ...so with that hope in mind...
If you want to market to me (Us?) - don't build this shit. Seriously, just don't. If I'm your target market, this isn't actually good web design.
Yeah, it's eye catchy, but you're making me dig for what I want to know: Does this actually solve my problem? The more marketing flash you put on top of that, the more I experience a sneaking suspicion that you're all style and no substance.
If you want to sell to me, use good clean UX that is pleasantly styled, but not flashy. And get to the point. Show me exactly what I need to know as fast as humanly possible, with a minimum of distraction and cognitive load. Show me your features. Show me your UX. Don't use graphical representations of your UX, show me the real thing. Screenshots of actual use cases. Show me how you handle the use cases that matter to me, your prospective user.
The more you hide your actual product, and try to distract me with fancy flash, the less likely I am to open up a conversation. I don't have time for this shit when I'm shopping for dev tooling. Make it as easy as humanly possible for me to determine whether you solve my problem in the way I need as quickly as humanly possible.
Maybe I'm an exception, but personally I think good web design is a design that communicates quickly, clearly, and cleanly while minimizing cognitive load.
These are not that. Many of them are expressly the opposite of that.
Edit: For those of you saying that sales are targeting managers not devs... uh... well... uh... I spent the last 5 years as DevOps/SRE Manager/Director so... uh... some of us keep our dev sensibilities I guess?
I'm certain due to human psychology, that the more "polished" a site looks, it translates into more leads
From your parent:
> Does this actually solve my problem? The more marketing flash you put on top of that, the more I experience a sneaking suspicion that you're all style and no substance.
This kind of person doesn't pay for stuff or asks too many questions. "CTOs" are the worst customers. They are always nickel and diming, willing to go through immense grief to "just" "use" "open source" and squeeze free from everywhere. This isn't bad, it's aligned with successful businesses. I'm saying that the people who pay for stuff are lazy, too, in a good way.
Seriously though I think we are pretty rare for wanting to cut through the BS. I've talked with a lot of people about this and while many will agree with me, when they actually see the results they don't like it as much as the flashy. It's disheartening.
Having said that, I recently enjoyed Val.Town's homepage [1]. It manages to keep things fun while showing me what I can actually do with it.
Yeah, I like Val's. That's how you do it :)
The second site featured is promoting "Become a 10x designer!"
That tells you everything you need to know about how substantive this list is.
Glossy isn't my cup of tea.
Would be lying though to say I wasn't inspired by some of the sites they showcase.
These days Times Square is all about video. Times have changed but the purpose is still the same, make you buy something.
\<thousand-yard-stare \/\>
I'll start: many of these are catchy, and even well executed. Many of them perform very poorly on my Linux VM running on a modest Windows host (VM ~6 GB RAM, 2x CPU, i7, no GPU).
That said, godly.website loaded very quickly and seemed to perform well.
Another comment described it as a “glossy magazine” vibe, which seems perfectly apt. Lots of us bemoan the fact that the internet isn’t a textbook or newspaper anymore. It is annoying when, like, NYT or something like that goes in a silly direction, but we’re not out here complaining that Mad Magazine and the backs of cereal boxes aren’t functional.
I take your point.
_cries in early 2010s designs_
Like I don't want one giant page with scrolling-bound effects. Just give me the damn content.
Mobbin is probably more useful to most people:
Sadly I have neither the photography skills, nor the type licenses, nor the actual need for a massive hero image in 99 out of 100 projects, so thanks but no thanks.
I'll keep digging and banging my head against the screen.
This list is possibly as useful as asking Midjourney for inspiration, except half as fun
Then change little details when you find yourself with a strong opinion.
Then over time you can incorporate ideas from your memory as well (which are still mostly derivative). Im pretty sure this is what everyone is doing.
I got exactly what I expected to see when I clicked on the linked website.
If I am going to be swayed that Obys' Grids[0] is bad, you better be comparing it to W3.org[1][2][3] or something..................................................
[0]: https://grids.obys.agency/
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-method-id/
[2]: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/
[3]: https://www.w3.org/news/2023/draft-note-catalan-gap-analysis...
Yeah, the white on yellow could be improved, but the page is pretty good in ways I care about most: it loads quickly, it has decent information density, it gives me all the information and links I want right on the landing page, and it doesn't use anything that would interfere with skimming, such as lazily loaded images or animations.
I do agree that your [2] example is great.
Robert Bringhurst once said "Design exists to honor content." That may be too conservative, as there is a place for design for its own sake. But few of these sites had anything to say other than "look at me!"
While I like that functionality being available, an X to indicate that the thing is not required feels pretty necessary to me. I almost just closed the site when I thought it was required.
Overall 3/10 "good webdesign"
Sites with animations and crazy stuff happening on desktop, but then show a small subset of that design on mobile are like ad campaigns made for Cannes: fun for the industry, but misses the mark in terms of market value.
I absolutely do not want animations that emerge when scrolling down a page. Im scrolling because I want a linear view of things, and the silly animations take away my control of the experience.
A good web design prioritises UX and accessibility, not first impressions for the sake of sales. Let your sales team take care of the first impressions, and focus on building a usable site instead of a clever one.
Most of "best websites" directories are for "installation art". Not usable, money-making design. It's art for artists.
But to be fair, we developers often do the same thing. We get too excited about dev-only things that don't always have much business value.
Also, how is a website that only provides links/QR code to the mobile app store a good web design?
That is the antithesis of good web design as it literally tells all users to not use their web site without providing any information what so ever.
That being said....
The New York Time is regularly running mixedia long-form journalism that intersperses scroll-bar-driven media with text. I'm not sure how much. Maybe one or two articles a week. The mixed media can be quite elaborate: animated graphs, video, diagrams with incremental annotation. I'm not entirely sold. But I can't help admiring what they're trying to do anyway. My read: that they are consciously trying to create a new vocabulary for presenting text-based information on the web.
The general style is as follows: four or five paragraphs of text, and as you scroll down, you encounter islands of animated media that are driven by scrolling. An example: a series of pictures, with annotations that appear sequentially explaining what your seeing. Or a graph, again with sequentially appearing graphs and annotations.
Some articles are more successful than others; but I will grudgingly admit that most of the animation sequences are worth about 1400 words.
Compare that to the web mockups on that page, where an entire website is worth about 36 words.
A few of these definitely get it right, but most of the animation-heavy ones load slow on my phone.
All new sites I load by default in Firefox with NoScript active. If it's blank or useless, I move on.
The side effect is that an awful lot of sites load really fast and I rarely have to put up with the "we care about your privacy (while hoping to sell you out under the guise of legitimate interest)" cookie pop-up BS...