Hacker News Reader

Comment by tommi | Hacker News Reader

Good comments! And congratulations as well.

> Invest $50 and buy a nice Wordpress theme off of ThemeForest, because junior software engineers are picky folk. If it nets you two more sales, then it's already paid itself off.

Second this! Being a software engineer is so much more than writing efficient algorithms. It's also about beautiful design in many ways. Average website design gives a feeling it could correlate to average design in other fields.

View on HN

Average website design gives a feeling it could correlate to average design in other fields.

I couldn't disagree more. I personally see no correlation between the design of his site and his software engineering ability. It's like saying you don't trust that engineer to design a bridge because the ring he's wearing is all jagged along the edges. What?

While I agree that there isn't necessarily an actual correlation, better visual design can make the content seem more trustworthy.

Yes, I would get that feeling, if I knew that the ring was designed by the same engineer designing the bridge. If you set out to do a book well, you also want to promote it as best as you can. Average website here raises the question why it's average.

There isn't necessarily a correlation. I am talking about the feeling the website gives.

One of the primary traits of a good developer is a strong desire for excellence. If a developer is willing to settle for a mediocre and boring design, then that is some (perhaps small) evidence that the book may contain mediocre and boring content.

Anecdotally: At the TechWeek Chicago job fair, there was a very high correlation between booths with good logos and graphic design and interesting people behind the booth. All of my good conversations were with people at the well designed booths.

EDIT: This is especially true since we are expected to pay for the book before we get access to it. This means that we cannot judge its quality in any holistic way, but must do our best to pre-judge its quality through various social signals.

I tend to agree with you, but it's possible the places with budgets to allow for high-quality graphic design and production (let alone conference attendance) also have budgets that allow for the salaries high-quality people often demand.

I personally go for things that have bad design. Like slackware linux. I associate bad graphic design with great software. I love seeing a great science fiction novel wrapped in a generic illustrated cover. It seems more quirky and personal to me. I think good design can be bought, so I distrust it. I really hate it when the packaging is slick, with a perfect logo, and a perfect website, but the product is terrible. Like you were fooled into buying it. It happens more often to me these days because good graphic design can be bought, or copy-pasted.

The ring an engineer wears is supposed to be be jagged along the edges, for a very specific reason. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring#Material_and_design

Are you implying some connection? How is an at best average website design related/justified? I don't get it.

(I actually don't really mind the design...with a few changes/simplifications on fonts, and some padding for extra whitespace on a bunch of elements, I think it could pull off a nice, clean, simple look)

Agree I could care less about marketing. The less the better, I'd rather have basic 1990s html than obviously purchased templates which are needed to peddle snake oil. It's like when I see a site that uses those standard images of business suits pointing at a screen or models pretending to be tech support I don't use them.

The only way to be sure is to conduct an experiment such as an A/B test.

I'd say generally, yes, design is disconnected from software engineering. However, there's also the human element to it -- we all have unconscious biases and preferences, which creative designs can play off of.

To put it another way, I don't think less of anyone for having bad design (unless it's defectively bad), but a good design will naturally draw me and endear me to the content without me even reading a word.

Beautiful design is an optimisation. It's far better to ship the book now and add the design later than it is to hold off shipping the book because the design isn't yet good enough for a subset of potential customers.

GitHub pages provides free hosting for something like this, some templates, and with some fairly simple changes in Markdown and CSS you could have this up relatively quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com