Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there were two large types of website designs:

(1) those archaic ones you'd find on your professor's website, plain HTML, no CSS or CSS that was just intended to do something annoying (blinking cursor, sparkles, matrix background, etc.)

(2) What I would describe as 'modern modern' - the (good) designs on this website, or that look you would get if you hired a designer today to design a landing page .. rounded corners, gradients, whitespace everywhere, hiding important options behind 'Show more' buttons, etc. (I'm just trying to be descriptive)

But I feel like in the early-mid 2000s, there was more of a middleground. The type of design I saw on Reddit (old.reddit.com), hacker news, myspace at its peak, facebook in the early days, etc.

Does anyone know if there is a database of website designs like those? Or how I could find more website designs like those in general? Pages that do use CSS/JS, but not the extremes on either side ('only HTML', 'design everything')?

The biggest dissonance for me comes when an administrative backend or line-of-business application is given the sparse whitespace treatment with all the functionality hidden behind opaque submenus and mysterious hieroglyphs.

This seems to be a misguided attempt to apply, to power user interfaces, UX principles that were intended to ease & maximise casual visitor engagement for brochureware or B2C commerce.

What I actually want for these interfaces is high information density and a visible palette of clearly labelled action buttons. And there are way too many product managers that think dropping a bit of table padding, with a "dense mode" toggle, is the answer.

I feel like there was a Cambrian explosion of UI design around the period of Geocities and web 2.0 sites like Digg. The Web was still in the early days of being monetized, and it had a fraction of the investment it has in terms of dedicated design teams, and all of the a/b testing to identify optimal design patterns for driving various actions.

Today we have survival of the fittest, and non-commercial design largely mirrors it due to that being what the tools and libraries to make sites offer.

Take a look at neocities websites for a bit of that, otherwise I would also like to know something that compiles that look!

My sites are still all mid-2000s HTML/CSS/Lite vanilla JS, even my businesses site.

Do you have links? I'd be curious to see them

sure, derekburgess.com

I really like this. Does just what it should.

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