Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting.
Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites.
I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article.
Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.
cupofjoakim · 46m ago
> Awwwards is not representative of the web at large
100%. I used to work at a studio specifically targeting winning awards with awwwards and it's definitely not the same as working on the normal web. Flashiness is way more important than performance there, be it in UX, conversions or load times.
It was a good space to play around with things like animations and webgl, but turns out that if your business needs to convert, those things can often come in the way of that.
jameslk · 1h ago
Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].
Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3].
> irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].
I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated".
The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous.
Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables.
If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true:
1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use
and
2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.
jameslk · 1h ago
Yes the fuzzy use of “complicated” is part of the problem with this article. I am assuming “complicated” here means it’s consequential to users from a bad UX perspective because the article mentions some business stats:
> Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales.
In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight).
The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world
Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s.
Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
neya · 1h ago
I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simple as a list (Facebook does this), open a random porn site or take away your life savings.
Just a sad state of affairs overall.
andirk · 6m ago
Any time I land on a webpage that has text that goes full width left-to-right with a white background and black text I feel there's a good chance it will be very useful content. I miss that.
tokioyoyo · 1h ago
Websites in 1990s and 2000s did not have UX flows that we have nowadays. Yes, most of it is extremely bloated. But some of the flows we have right now, would just not be possible with the 2000s components. There are also billions of more people browsing the web nowadays as well.
agumonkey · 42m ago
I'd say it's in between, the early web was funny but wild (popups or whatever the guy decided to do with dhtml) but there was an era of stable light ux, maybe just before the web 2, where you had a bit of ajax but simple webpages and near no bloat.
k310 · 2h ago
Many web pages are impossible to read without ad-blockers, Safari Reader, or whatever Firefox does to print (to pdf). I've tried other readability extensions and they didn't satisfy.
pmontra · 2h ago
Firefox has a reader mode. It does not work on every site, probably because on some sites it can't decide where it's the content. Examples with Firefox nightly on Android: it works on the site this thread is about, it does not work on HN.
k310 · 1h ago
Sorry, I missed that. It's right in the URL bar, or it was until I started typing this reply. Not pretty, though. Thanks for pointing it out. The print rendition, original or simplified, is usually great.
bravesoul2 · 1h ago
In using brave (username checks out)
neepi · 1h ago
So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email.
I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.
As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.
Perhaps it's the people?
shoeb00m · 1h ago
Eh, depending on the amount of content on the page astro + react is fine. Astro lets you output everything as static html so it doesn’t hurt your page scores
I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
neepi · 1h ago
They took two days and used react components and all sorts of shit and we nearly missed the deadline due to it.
The page I did was less than 4K with all content and css embedded and took me 10 minutes.
There's doing the job and there's costing the company a boat load of money doing the job.
shoeb00m · 35m ago
Ok fair enough, but I think you just have incompetent devs
neepi · 19m ago
That is precisely my point.
jiggawatts · 48m ago
"You see, I have this hammer."
"I need a screw driven."
"Hammer! I have a hammer. Just one. This one."
andsoitis · 2h ago
”Yet here we are - the average website now weighs around 2.5MB according to HTTP Archive. That's heavier than the original Doom game.”
ehnto · 1h ago
And so little is delivered with the 2.5mb. Worrying more that so much traffic is bot traffic, and bloating sites becomes significantly wasted resources.
mediumsmart · 7m ago
I just rewrote a wordpress site made 7 years ago for a client as a static site. Replaced the index.html 4 image parallax with a 3 image css slider (mobile, desktop versions) and added 5 languages for the 5 pages the site has.
complete website now weighs 15.9 MB - 14.5 MB is images (395 including responsive versions plus fallback twin). The index page now has a total of 558KB while the same page in the old WP site clocks 21MB - (5.7MB for the 4 images) which it loads in steps 8MB - then 17MB and jumping to final 21MB when I move the cursor from the reload button over to the page.
palmfacehn · 1h ago
I'm starting to think that lightweight framework for web apps might be a wasm-dos-win3.11 or wasm-wince target.
locallost · 1h ago
> Let's be honest: you're designing to impress other designers, not users. And that's the problem.
I've referred to this as "CV driven development". Although to be fair that developer that designs a microservice architecture for 50 users is not better either.
But on the whole, I don't agree with the title. My feeling is - overall - pages have become a lot less gimmicky than they used to be.
bravesoul2 · 1h ago
Oi designers? You mean oi enshittifing CTOs?
Arainach · 1h ago
My experience is that CTOs don't care about animations, rounded corners, or what not - they care about metrics. These artsy bullshit layouts are suggested by design teams and the technical side either doesn't care/is content to delegate or there's someone at director level who wants to be the next Steve Jobs and empowers design.
This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.
cyberax · 44m ago
This CTO is bugging designers to not do anything moving and insisted on adding a "no animation" mode to our apps.
Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder...
And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.
Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites.
I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article.
Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.
100%. I used to work at a studio specifically targeting winning awards with awwwards and it's definitely not the same as working on the normal web. Flashiness is way more important than performance there, be it in UX, conversions or load times.
It was a good space to play around with things like animations and webgl, but turns out that if your business needs to convert, those things can often come in the way of that.
Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3].
0. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte...
1. https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics
2. https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript
3. https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280...
I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated".
The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous.
Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables.
If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true:
1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use
and
2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.
> Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales.
In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight).
The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world
Usability is.
Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
Just a sad state of affairs overall.
I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.
As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.
Perhaps it's the people?
I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
The page I did was less than 4K with all content and css embedded and took me 10 minutes.
There's doing the job and there's costing the company a boat load of money doing the job.
"I need a screw driven."
"Hammer! I have a hammer. Just one. This one."
complete website now weighs 15.9 MB - 14.5 MB is images (395 including responsive versions plus fallback twin). The index page now has a total of 558KB while the same page in the old WP site clocks 21MB - (5.7MB for the 4 images) which it loads in steps 8MB - then 17MB and jumping to final 21MB when I move the cursor from the reload button over to the page.
I've referred to this as "CV driven development". Although to be fair that developer that designs a microservice architecture for 50 users is not better either.
But on the whole, I don't agree with the title. My feeling is - overall - pages have become a lot less gimmicky than they used to be.
This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.
Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder...
And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.