Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact | Hacker News Reader

Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact

lingscars.com

114 pointsharel94 comments

Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a "Hacker site" hit them..

This made me laugh out loud for real. Like in 1995.

https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS/status/344424290189455360

Part of me thought this was a practical joke. So many sites back in the day just wouldn't load...

Sadly Lin is now blaming Hacker News for hacking her site with the intention of taking it offline - which is just retarded as:

a) we're legitimate curious visitors (albeit not maybe not customers - but who's to say that some of us wouldn't be converted from window shoppers to buyers - that's kind of the point of websites after all) and

b) her webserver set up to only allow for 500 concurrent connections. Which is just pathetic - particularly given the amount of crap she serves (and thus the countless number of additional server connections each visitor makes to download said content).

I used to think that her site was a mark of a genius; where she deliberately made her site to look amateurish to push the site viral and thus give her huge exposure that most other rentals could only dream of. But then I read her rage tweets[1] and realised that she's just another idiot with an internet connection. Needless to say I'm very disappointed - I liked Lin and her site better when I thought it was designed ironically.

[1] https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS

Her site is fun. I remember a while ago, you could go to the site map and it'd been laid out like a concentration camp. The visitors at various pages/camp locations would be little humanoids with the relevant browser logo for the head.

She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one.

Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention.

> Her site is fun. I remember a while ago, you could go to the site map and it'd been laid out like a concentration camp. The visitors at various pages/camp locations would be little humanoids with the relevant browser logo for the head.

"Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context.

> She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one.

Well obviously. I wasn't complaining about her abilities as a hacker though. I was commenting about how I preferred her site when I thought it was a deliberate ploy to go viral.

> Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention.

I'm British English too - and few people here know the correct term for "ironic" let alone use it accurately. We've truly adopted Americanised term there. However if you follow "The King's English", then the term simply refers to stating the contrary to what is meant. Since I was referring to her site looking like it was meant to be amaturish but in fact being deliberate, that could be argued as being "ironic". But regardless of it's usage, you're just arguing semantics and thus missing my point entirely.

"Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context.

Not everyone is deathly afraid of dark humour. Stand-up comedy in particular is full of it, yet people still seem to think of it as 'fun'.

The arguing semantics thing was just that, which is why it was marked as an addendum with the 'also'.

> Not everyone is deathly afraid of dark humour. Stand-up comedy in particular is full of it, yet people still seem to think of it as 'fun'.

Oh I love dark humour, but there are some things we shouldn't trivialise and concentration camps are one of those things (if you had to sit through the same stories I had about your grandparents time in such camps, then I'm sure you'd agree).

To be fair, the trouble with a name like Hacker News is that the uninitiated don't know it's for programmers and entrepreneurs.

And I never get people having a go about stuff like concurrent connections at amateurs, that's completely our fault.

Why can't web servers stop acting like babies that need constant attention with some sort of mystical knowledge to stop them falling over when something new happens? Why is our software so brittle?

Because hardware varies significantly. What's optimal on some systems is sub-par on others. Thus it takes a sysadmin to set up the server optimally.

Also, most web farms these days are built with multiple nodes that serve ~500 concurrent requests (even multiple VMs performs better than one instance of Linux on the same hardware running bare metal) and load distributed across each node. So a 500 concurrent default is entirely reasonable.

However all of the above is moot because she's running Apache on Debian - which does not default to 500 concurrent connections. That is a setting she's applied herself (or paid someone to set up).

And for the record, I'm all for amateurs rolling their own web servers - I'm certainly not elitist in that regard. But the fact remains that some of this stuff is rather technical, so complaining that it isn't easy is like saying cars should be self-servicing and that we shouldn't need garages and engineers.

But a lot of these limits could default to automatically adjust. Serving much more than 500 concurrent requests for static content is rather trivial on most remotely modern hardware if the software is designed for it.

And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well over a decade. E.g. Eddie is 14 years old (http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html - see the "Quality of Service" section in particular - while Eddie is intended for clustered setups, there are many situations where this approach is amenable even to single server setups) and provides a solution (amongst others) where if the system can't handle the incoming traffic, rather than serving up the main page and choking on assets and failing miserably in serving up anything to anyone, you can serve up a small light "queue" page and grant access to the full site as and when capacity allows.

There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box experience tremendously much better for less technical users.

> But a lot of these limits could default to automatically adjust.

No. I do not want my server hardware attempting to guess optimal performance. I'd rather do that myself and know that it's set up correctly.

You wouldn't buy a sports car then moan that it's a manual gear box and lacks cruise control. Just as you wouldn't run an automated tool to master a studio recording before sending the master off for CD pressing. If people want guesswork then don't install professional tools (sane defaults are another issue though - I just object to pro-tools applying guesswork).

> And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well over a decade.

Apache does queue TCP/IP connection requests. "Sorry pages" should be configured on the load balancer rather than HTTP daemon as the whole point of them is to offload the work from the saturated nodes.

> There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box experience tremendously much better for less technical users.

A lot of software does have crap defaults, like how Apache publishes it's version number and the underlying OS by default (the ServerTokens directive). However the examples given (concurrent connections and sorry pages) are not wrong (her concurrent connections is set to a non-default value and sorry pages don't belong on the HTTP daemon because they're supposed to bypass the load)

"No. I do not want my server hardware attempting to guess optimal performance. I'd rather do that myself and know that it's set up correctly."

Parent said "default to automatically adjust" - and I see no reason it shouldn't. You could still manually tweak all you want.

The automatic adjust option would be a crap default though. Just the process of Apache checking whether a page is static or dynamic means accepting the connection to begin with - by which point it would be too late to forward the connection to a sorry page if content is dynamic. It would also mean that connections end up stacking at a far greater rate as Apache is required to open each and every request just to identify teh requested file. The whole process would just break servers that are already under heavy load and serves no purpose what-so-ever on servers that aren't stressed. And since this whole argument is about how software should ship sane defaults, Apache is definitely doing the right thing by not including such nonsense by default.

Believe me when I say that I'd welcome such a routine if it was practical as it would save me weeks of my life from load testing and fine tuning. But it just wouldn't work in practice.

Automatic dynamic tuning isn't an obvious choice[1], and isn't what I was suggesting, and I doubt it was what the parent great-grandparent was suggesting. I simply meant scaling parameters based on the hardware available and whatever else can be determined easily at configuration time.

[1] Not going to come out and say it couldn't work, but I am skeptical for a good many reasons, some of which you've touched on.

Ahh yes. That could work. In fact I've often wondered why Apache didn't attempt a little of that (even just on the most rudimentary level; setting the concurrency of processes based on the number of CPU cores reported. But it wouldn't be hard to add a little more intelligence)

If that was what the parent comments referred to though, then it's still a moot point as Lin was isn't running the default tunings (if her 500 concurrent figure is to be believed), so the issue still falls back on her rather than Apache defaults (which is what this argument started over). Though I guess you could also argue that if Apache did some level of auto-tuning then Lin may not have felt obliged to tamper with the defaults.

What makes you think the site is "serious" now? She just doesn't know what Hacker News is, and can't be blamed for that. She just knows that some self-proclaimed "hackers" brought her site down with lots of traffic.

The ASCII art in the source code is awesome, BTW.

Oh I'm sure it's not meant to be taken completely serious. But the question is whether it was designed to be so bad that it goes viral. ie is it accidentally badly designed but meant to be lighthearted, or badly designed with the intention of becoming it's own publicity stunt?

The ASCII art is actually pretty impressive - which now has me wondering if I was wrong to dismiss her.

I guess this site is proof that there's often a fine line between genius and insanity.

edit: though there's always the 3rd option; she could just be a successful troll.

I'm not down!!!

Oh, wait, I misread. :)

"WAH! My site is under heavy load! I am working very hard to bring it back soon!"

thats a progress to the prior cookie and redirect hell.

Viewable through archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20130607102023/http://www.lingsca...

Ow, my eyes!

The earlier version looks more modern

For some reason I just got a nostalgic warm-fuzzy over this. Not only the site's 1990s look, but that this kind of "misunderstanding" still happens.

Don't assume that: "tried to cache the website? >> I've been chasing it around all day, can't cache it. Too fast for me." (her twitter today).

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ - Survived the tests of time. I hear it still converts ;]

First time I saw this I thought: "uhm, what a nice scammy little site..."

Right? Whois checks out, though.

That was one of my favorite funny examples, where people with enormous amount of money built such a simple website.

Especially with the cheap car insurance promo.

Did you actually read the message from Buffet to convince people to buy jewelry?

--> http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/message.html

Fine jewelry, watches and giftware will almost certainly cost you less at Borsheim's. I've looked at the figures for all publicly-owned jewelry companies and the contrast with Borsheim's is startling. Our one-store operation, with its huge volume, enables us to operate with costs that are fully 15-20 percentage points below those incurred by our competitors. We pass the benefits of this low-cost structure along to our customers.

It's not just the small players that preserve such excellent retro-design insight. May I introduce the HBO Corporate website:

http://www.homeboxoffice.com/

Wow that is a lot like a site I would have made in 1997. (I'm not a web designer, but back then sometimes there was no one else to do it.)

Except that Donald Norman would say that putting directions like "PLEASE NOTE: For GUIDE SERVICES, MEDIA RELATIONS and access to other HBO EXTRANET sites, use the links on the left." means that your user interface is not self-explanatory and should be fixed.

It's nice how they posted the website opening hours on the website. Really good stuff.

The best part is her cookie disclaimer:

"EU cookie law. Piss off Von Rumpy. Me... I hammer visitors to death with cookies, so I can find out what they want. Cookies allow my website to serve visitors the content they need. Get used to it. The EU cookie law is an ass. - Ling"

I present you http://www.fabricland.co.uk/ - real shop (with a branch near me) and actually a pretty good place, just with a hideous (and genuine, as far as I can tell) web site.

A quick glance seems to indicate they break every rule of modern web design. It's almost too perfect. Like the spec was to to do the exact oposite of what you're supposed to....

It's titled "New Page 1". It's just so perfect.

The title of the mainframe page is "Fabricland fabric shops throughout South of England and mail order service". So, that's good and informative.

My wife buys fabrics from them. Class.

Take note of the white ‘sample’ written over the VISA/MasterCard pictures.

The customer service is as offensive as the web site. My wife (a regular customer) is always complaining about it. But it's cheap and well stocked.

I can't link to it now because the site is down, but lingscars has a PDF of 'web design tips' where she explains the design and gives tips on website design. She's obviously got an eccentric public image, and the design tips document is a bit of a joke, but the design here was a deliberate choice to differentiate the site from competitors, make potential customers feel less intimidated and more socially involved. There was even a webcam of the office with a button which apparently played a song in the office when you pressed it.

The business is also doing very well.

I really enjoyed the cookie ticker. Here are its full contents: http://pastie.org/8034213

Unfortunately, the site seems to have detected me mucking about (perhaps because I deleted the element containing the annoying flash video?) and redirected me to /_donotsteal.html (which itself was a redirect to /_donotsteal.html) for a while. Now it just serves me a 1-byte file for any URL, except for /_donotsteal.html, which is 4 bytes.

Christ on a bike, there's a lot of weird stuff in there:

    cookie:sexual_orientation=female; - watches how often visitors make irrational decision changes and identifies those people who are schizophrenic as: FEMALE.

    cookie:favourite_biscuit=garibaldi; - can detect missed key-strokes caused by crumbs jamming the user keyboard. Compares results over a long period of time to determine typical biscuit type.

    cookie:favourite_animal_noise=BAAAAA; - monitors any accidentally open audio channels, to determine if the user snorts or chuckles while browsing and then compares the wavelength of the noise with a table of animal sounds.

Here's Ling's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?authToken=qSpd&id=3543...

I think there's some sort of genius in there. Its somewhat like playing the piano and faking playing the wrong notes intentionally - its a lot harder to fake playing badly than it is to actually play bad (if that makes sense)

Does she have a public profile? The link you provided requires auth. I think she's fascinating and inspiring.

http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/ling-valentine/b/a49/2ab

MSY, a popular computer parts store in Australia, has always had a pretty dodgy-looking website.

http://msy.com.au/

They're probably the most popular PC parts store in Australia (I've bought from them), yet it looks like they couldn't afford to upgrade their site template they created in 1997.

Last time I went in there I was impressed that they had now invested in a few tables around their counter area.

The funny thing is that they look more professional since the site redesign.

I think it's a deliberate ploy to seem cheap. They are expanding at a frenetic pace, so seems to be working!

Might be something like this http://www.mtechlaptops.com/indexofnotebooks.htm who actually tell you why that is; http://www.mtechlaptops.com/ugly_web_site.htm .

Besides that; the co-founder (from Australia) of one of the companies I built and sold successfully, was always quite focused on making 'ugly' designs. We did split-testing with pixel perfect, really professional designs versus this 1995, quite ugly 'old' stuff and every time the ugly design won at conversions. This is the consumer space we were in. We tested many times it the 'ugly' design always won.

Maybe times have changed (this is about 5 years ago), but it always makes a bit suspicious of that cry for the perfect design while it actually, again, at least then, had a averse effect. I still know of a few cases where the owner swears by amateur and ugly. The theory apparently is that a lot of people don't trust slick and believe they will be screwed somehow.

Edit: another one I just thought off; marktplaats.nl (Dutch Ebay and owned by Ebay since 2004) has looked like this; http://web.archive.org/web/19991105082644/http://www.marktpl... for a very long time. Everyone in the web design business thought it was horrible in many ways, but consumers refused to use anything else, including ebay.nl. They hardly touched the design until recently and it is still clear that they didn't want to piss the users off too much.

I go to a large indoor swap meet/flea market near here to check out used computer equipment, tools and other stuff. The aisles are crowded, stuff hangs everywhere, lights are flashing, sounds collide, sellers project offers to you from behind makeshift counters, and you move through it slowly to make sure you don't miss anything.

This site gives me the same feeling -- raw selling.

Edit: respectfully fixed a typo.

I loooove Lings Cars - her "nuclear missile" is parked just round the corner from my house

Watch her on here on dragons den to understand the nuclear missile quip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1ktZRZ5ZM

A must watch - http://www.besquare.me/session/the-future-of-digital-marketi...

Man, this is so enlighting. Much more than most of what I rad on HN for some time. Thx for the link!

Ling's got some solid points to make. For example, the silly things she does on her site builds trust with her customers because her customers get more of a glimpse into her personality compared to other dealerships. Trust converts more than pretty, or sensible, visual design.

It's taking branding in a different direction than what we normally consider and I think it's worth while to think outside the box most of us put ourselves in when considering how to maximize conversions. I don't know if what Ling's doing is optimal, but it definitely sheds light on other approaches that are sometimes ignored.

This is one of my favorites: http://www.arngren.net/

Arngren started out as an electronics and hobby type store in Oslo, and a catalog, and their website looks pretty much the way their massive catalogue used to look like 20+ years ago, when it had toys and household stuff in between pages of IC's with pinouts.

On one hand the website is horrible. On the other hand, it perfectly captures the brand...

The direct response industry continues to use long sales letters and "ugly" design to great effect. It's the same kind of a/b testing that agile UX practitioners espouse that produced "Red gets read!" lore in direct marketing. Still gives me the heabie jeabies looking at that stuff though.

Is there a good beginner's guide to learning about that sort of thing? I'll use whatever works, even arcane and ugly landing pages.

The best way to learn is to measure. Try one type of ad, measure response and reach, adjust, measure again. Rinse and repeat until you see what works and what doesn't.

Close, but it still doesn't beat Yvettes' [1]

[1] http://websitesfromhell.net/view/yvettesbridalformal.com-10/ (Site is no longer up).

Beats it hands down imo.

This is a Norwegian classic: http://arngren.net/

w-hat are they doing wrong?

http://www.lingscars.com/ redirects to http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html

Firefox (NoScript) shows:

The page isn't redirecting properly

Iceweasel has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies.

Lynx shows:

lynx http://www.lingscars.com/

Looking up www.lingscars.com Making HTTP connection to www.lingscars.com Sending HTTP request. HTTP request sent; waiting for response. HTTP/1.1 302 Found Data transfer complete HTTP/1.1 302 Found Using http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html Looking up www.lingscars.com Making HTTP connection to www.lingscars.com Sending HTTP request. HTTP request sent; waiting for response. HTTP/1.1 302 Found Data transfer complete HTTP/1.1 302 Found

lynx: Start file could not be found or is not text/html or text/plain Exiting...

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.li...

webcache - so this site worked - and went down by a Hacker News DDoS of only 31 points (3100 visitors) in 56 minutes.

/me sings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE

<BLINK>THERE ARE PLENTY MORE TO FIND HERE</BLINK>

http://www.iamsad.co.uk/

Brilliant. From the live office webcams page (where you have the option to taunt specific employees):

"Are those traffic lights real? Yes! There is another set of traffic lights, hidden to the left of the camera, too! They keep my staff awake with visual stimulation in the same way that my website invigorates my visitors!"

The office looks just like the website.

The tutorial for using the website is awesome (and beautifully anti-american): http://www.lingscars.com/chat.php?domain=www.lingscars.com&l...

Similar colour scheme to iOS7.

The classical text only version of a website in case your bandwidth is limited: http://www.timecube.com/

It seems the site is redirecting to http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html for me?

Same here

Maybe it is because of my ad-blocker?

http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/ - will bring hours of enjoyment then

It's a pretty funny, retro looking site but as far as I can tell she does pretty well out of it. She might not be an artist but she's great at marketing in her own way.

This one is awesome http://www.wingsandwheels.com/wantads1.htm