Always find it bizarre that someone living in late-stage capitalism doesn't understand late-stage capitalism.
Middle classes are buying status and lifestyle, not reliability, like some farmer.
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Why is website design so awful today, generally?
- Thread starter Tozovac
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Always find it bizarre that someone living in late-stage capitalism doesn't understand late-stage capitalism.
Middle classes are buying status and lifestyle, not reliability, like some farmer.
I was talking about the product not consumer behavior. Products are too similar because thats how companies save more money.
I bought two tablecloths a while ago. They were different brands, but after I got them home I realised that both had word-for-word identical text on the back of the packaging. Both companies had obviously contracted the same manufacturer in China and hadn't even bothered to customise the text!
exactly what i am talking about. There is more on this topic but i do not want to derail the thread
Here's a good example of what has been lost over the years, from Apple's own website:
The iPhone launch day website (source link for photo).
I love how much useful information was shown in such a compact amount of space.
I can't stand the "brochure" style now that requires endless scrolling and hijacks the scroll process.
🤬
The iPhone launch day website (source link for photo).
I love how much useful information was shown in such a compact amount of space.
I can't stand the "brochure" style now that requires endless scrolling and hijacks the scroll process.
🤬
form > function is their style
i hate those full screen sized images you actually need to scroll through them. I think a lot of reason is because they make them dual purposed for mobile sized screens
I dislike auto play videos and automatic carousel components.
This one is a clean design:
www.wiehag.com
It looks nice however, and is probably not one of the worst offenders of this type.
This one is a clean design:
I suspect the WIEHAG site is one of those:
Atlassian Central - world’s tallest hybrid timber tower
WIEHAG setting new heights in sustainable tall hybrid timber construction. In 2026 Atlassian will be world’s tallest hybrid timber commercial tower.
It looks nice however, and is probably not one of the worst offenders of this type.
It was extremely "clean" for me, because none of the images loaded!
I remember the old Lagonda was a frightening thing with the displays it had. There were two versions. The latter had CRTs if I am not mistaken.
They did not really do anything better than the standard dials of a regular Aston Martin but they did fit with the polarising nature of the Lagonda.
Thankfully these days things are better.
Wow! Not sure how that happened.
You are right, something has broken on that site.
It could be the Cloudflare protection they have on the site.
Same for me no images and then a captcha, still a pretty well-thought out site and pretty user friendly.
Here is the Swiss Federal Railway site for comparison. It works pretty well and I will say the app is very useful.
https://www.sbb.ch/en
Here is the Swiss Federal Railway site for comparison. It works pretty well and I will say the app is very useful.
https://www.sbb.ch/en
That's a very clean and simple site too - I like the railway clock, that's a nice touch.
Digging more into the Belgian site, the menu is really well done, it's just easy find what you want. It isn't cluttered, there isn't excessive movement, just some subtle animations on icons, and it is quick.
The Swiss one has some nice touches elsewhere:
When you scroll down the page, those quick links collapse into buttons, but they float and then expand if you need to use them. Also a lot of attention gone into spacing of elements - that's something I like.
Digging more into the Belgian site, the menu is really well done, it's just easy find what you want. It isn't cluttered, there isn't excessive movement, just some subtle animations on icons, and it is quick.
The Swiss one has some nice touches elsewhere:
When you scroll down the page, those quick links collapse into buttons, but they float and then expand if you need to use them. Also a lot of attention gone into spacing of elements - that's something I like.
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I must ask:
People who say that web design was awful and ugly in 00's how is this and many other sites ugly:
It's from 2002, but many other sites I visited were idk…Just websites. The childhood sites I remember looked normal to me and look even good nowadays. Even the news portal I use today was better back in 2002. Today it's infested with ads, gotta pay for 1,99€ for an article or subscribe and if you use an adblocker you get this huge banned "YOU'RE USING AN ADBLOCKER" and it wont let you even close it or read anything, but back in 2002 there were just three ads and honestly, the site worked faster 😅
I've mostly heard this "2000's websites were horrible" from reddit, but from my memories they weren't and even forums were nicer + created jobs. Nowadays everything belongs to some companies. And yes, I absolutely remember there being forums everywhere about different things and some of them were looking for moderators as a paid job. Folks in reddit disagreed with me, but I absolutely remember there being paid jobs of being a moderator etc. Nowadays everything is so American centric and Facebook even destroyed social media in my own country and reddit killed the forums etc.
How's reddit better? This isn't a nostalgia speaking, but true memories. And no, I didn't have to wait the whole day to download a song, because I remember downloading Grand theft auto 1 back in 2002 from Kazaa within at least 15 minutes and the movie "The Matrix" within two hours at least and I burned it onto the CD (We didn't have a DVD burner).
Same with the game Mafia and Vice city later. I legit don''t have bad memories nor think it was that horrible of a time and I don't think that website design was that awful. It seems to be more awful today. Especially when you go to Reddit and check out people's portfolios etc. They all look the same.
Even dating sites were better back in 00's. There was no swiping, you could talk to whomever you want and profiles were deeper. My sister found her husband on a dating site back in 2003. They're still together.
I am so happy and grateful that MacRumors hasn't been shut down and become only a sub-reddit or I'm rather glad that when you click on the "Forums" on the main site it won't redirect you to a subreddit.
People who say that web design was awful and ugly in 00's how is this and many other sites ugly:
It's from 2002, but many other sites I visited were idk…Just websites. The childhood sites I remember looked normal to me and look even good nowadays. Even the news portal I use today was better back in 2002. Today it's infested with ads, gotta pay for 1,99€ for an article or subscribe and if you use an adblocker you get this huge banned "YOU'RE USING AN ADBLOCKER" and it wont let you even close it or read anything, but back in 2002 there were just three ads and honestly, the site worked faster 😅
I've mostly heard this "2000's websites were horrible" from reddit, but from my memories they weren't and even forums were nicer + created jobs. Nowadays everything belongs to some companies. And yes, I absolutely remember there being forums everywhere about different things and some of them were looking for moderators as a paid job. Folks in reddit disagreed with me, but I absolutely remember there being paid jobs of being a moderator etc. Nowadays everything is so American centric and Facebook even destroyed social media in my own country and reddit killed the forums etc.
How's reddit better? This isn't a nostalgia speaking, but true memories. And no, I didn't have to wait the whole day to download a song, because I remember downloading Grand theft auto 1 back in 2002 from Kazaa within at least 15 minutes and the movie "The Matrix" within two hours at least and I burned it onto the CD (We didn't have a DVD burner).
Same with the game Mafia and Vice city later. I legit don''t have bad memories nor think it was that horrible of a time and I don't think that website design was that awful. It seems to be more awful today. Especially when you go to Reddit and check out people's portfolios etc. They all look the same.
Even dating sites were better back in 00's. There was no swiping, you could talk to whomever you want and profiles were deeper. My sister found her husband on a dating site back in 2003. They're still together.
I am so happy and grateful that MacRumors hasn't been shut down and become only a sub-reddit or I'm rather glad that when you click on the "Forums" on the main site it won't redirect you to a subreddit.
Late 90's early 2000 was peak website design.Easy to navigate and functional. No loading elements is a big plus (except for gifs). Not to say all websites are bad today. Amazon is great with loading and usability even with the complexity of javascript and others. Another good example is google docs. The annoying part about back then is for some reason each landing page was an "ENTER WEBSITE" page for reason I still do not know why.
here is a couple of examples how clean websites were in 2001.
Depends if you are on dial up or dsl. Dial up was 56kbps , dsl was 256kbps . on Dialup the matrix movie would take you about 16 hours to download at 400mb horrible quality but because you are downloading from others (not server) the upload is actually slower than the download so it could be 2 days.
On Dialup we literally had to wait for the image to show up XD
Not sure which psychopath thought its a great idea to create a popup window as you scroll down a page and completely paralyze the site browsing, and who is even more psychopath he actually thought its a good idea to implement. I wonder how many people go "YEAH! I want to join your newsletter to keep sending infinite spam of your products to make me buy them!"
I have the same opinion about 'back button trapping'. I DESPISE any behavior where clicking the back button (or using the back swipe trackpad gesture) basically reloads the site I was on instead of actually going back a page (often back to Google from wherever I was at). If your site sucks so much it has to literally keep me from leaving it, it ain't worth my time!
The back button had no place in the last 10 years and should be removed from browsers. There is a good technical explanation for it, but I honestly can' be bothered considering that concepts like responsive programming, and legal accessibility standards aren't even being acknowledged.
If you don't want the discount, just click the X. Not a hard concept, I would have thought.
And if I see someone's ad somewhere, like on YouTube etc I'll avoid buying them
Nearly every website now has a popup for cookies then another asking for your email address. I typically (barely) tolerate those two, if another comes along, I leave the site. Sometimes I’m gone after the first popup wanting my address.
Same with retail sites with the small popup on the bottom telling me what Joe Schmo from East Timbuktu just bought. I leave their site and buy whatever I’m after from another site.
Same with retail sites with the small popup on the bottom telling me what Joe Schmo from East Timbuktu just bought. I leave their site and buy whatever I’m after from another site.
if you have adblocker you can enable Annoyances and it will take out some of these pop ups and cookie notices out
I do run an ad blocker. The last time I looked at the settings to try to kill the popups I was unable to find a solution. I guess popup is not really the correct term, since it’s not a new window like in the old days. It’s more of an element maybe? I don’t know the correct name.
It has been a while since I’ve checked, I’ll need to have another look.
Excepting that RealPlayer. So glad we don't need video plugins nowadays.