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Comment by srconstantin | Hacker News Reader

I actually miss old-fashioned web design. These old pages look like text, and not much else. But most of what I want to do online is text; I want to read and write. The simplicity is actually an aid to clarity.

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I use a very plain style for my personal Web site as its aimed at teachers (educational institutions don't always have recent computers) and students (they tend to use phones for Web browsing).

I suspect there is considerable peer pressure on any small company or computer professional to have a Web site that looks 'designed'. Shame really.

And the problem with those designs is that they constantly evolve to become worse UX-wise. The web is very much gullible to fashion change and, unlike fashion in clothes, there seems to be no safe middle ground (like denim, for example) that would always be relatively the same and never out of fashion.

And the low-contrast-looks-beautiful fashion is just plain crazy. Whenever I happen to visit a pretentiously designed web site, I cringe in anticipation of hard to read text and my browser getting jerky when trying to scroll.

I'm pretty tired of all the gratuitous peacocking of web sites too. At this point I wouldn't mind much if all the HTML5 stuff just got tossed in the trash in favor of a simpler stack that made the important things like making CSS layout less agonizing work. I'm sure a lot of us read HN partly because it's so refreshingly unornamented.

This drive to make web "apps" has a lot more to do with politics than it does with user experience or good engineering.

+1 for the phrase "gratuitous peacocking of web sites."

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