It's a satirical tweet, but I find it interesting the tweet is 6 year old and reflects how little has changed in website design. I’m undecided if this a good or bad thing.
For startups and SaaS websites this layout template is instantly recognisable. Is it a cookie-cutter approach to website design? Or a boring but reliable layout template?
I recently started designing t-shirts aimed at gamers. It's not art, more like graphic design. I uploaded the designs to a Print on Demand (POD) service. Sales so far are zero (which is what I was expecting) but the main movitation was to improve my design skills.
What I would love to hear from anyone (especially gamers) is:
Are these designs any good or likeable? Or something you would never wear?
The game controllers are not meant to imitate actual game controllers (e.g. Xbox) but are a stylized interpretation. But I wonder if gamers prefer a copy of their favourite console controller instead of something more generic or abstract?
And for those interested in more detail...here's what I've learned so far designing t-shirts:
- Keep it simple: A design that is easy to understand and be seen from a distance can work well.
- Choice of type matters: This makes a big difference. I haven't mastered this by a long shot. Still learning and practising.
- Colour is important: finding a pleasant-looking combination of appealing colours is really hard.
Fun fact: The design with the wording 'Ready to play' was rejected by the POD service. I later discovered it was because it is a trademarked phrase!
Thank you everyone for your encouraging comments. As with any product, there's always the fear of "if I build, will they come?" But without building, I'll never know. So time to get building :-)
I hope it's OK to piggyback on this question and ask: are there any opportunities in designing (and selling) website themes, particulalrly non-Wordpress themes?
Many replies here say don't offer design. But presumably, even when you're developing the backend, you need to reach for a front-end design or template - either free or for sale. The market for HTML/CSS themes is completely saturated though - is it fruitless to pursue this avenue?
You might not need a static site generator for a single page website. Why not simply author it directly in HTML and CSS? It might actually be faster (and simpler) to code by hand.
Here are two dummy test pages I made a while ago to see if I could create a fast-loading, fairly lengthy text page for slow mobile connections.
There is no table of contents, but you could add that as a simple list of links to the top of the page.
> A blog is really fast if you don't put anything but text in it basically
Here's a dummy test page I made a while ago to see if I could create a fairly lengthy, fast-loading text page for slow mobile connections. It's hosted on a cheap shared hosting plan, so it may well fall over (or not!)
The image at the top of the page hasn't been optimized (about 40kb), however I do think aesthetics are important in page design and I'm against reverting to a plain HTML look with no CSS styling. The test pages above are plain looking but, I hope, reasonably pleasant to look at. (The custom font version looks nicer in my view than the no font loading version, but of course it adds a bit of extra page weight).
Version B has two different font weights from the same family: Regular and Medium/Semi-bold. Version A relies on the fonts already installed on the user's computer.
Dropping the semi-bold font weight would save approx 23k, but having a regular and bold font weight felt like the minimal styles needed to support the page.
Dropping the header image would save 40k. (Note: the header image hasn't been optimised using something like the HTML srcset attribute which can load different picture sizes for different devices).
Text articles are probably the most widespread type of content on the web. Most web sites are not web apps. But many developers want to re-construct web sites into web app architectures even when there's no benefit to the end user.
I posted the links below on a previous discussion about AMP. They are two examples of basic, javascript-free web pages with text content. There's about 2500+ words on these test pages, but the page weight is still much smaller than, for example, a medium article with one tenth the number of words (250).
Try loading them on your mobile on a 3G (or slower) connection. Do they load fast or slow?
Thanks for trying out these test pages! When I created them, I tried loading them in different locations on my phone. Surprisingly, even in busy city-centre locations (using 3G), the pages weren't always loading instantly - but they were fairly fast, enough to feel usable.
Do we really need Instant Articles (Facebook) and AMP (Google) when we can accomplish fast loading pages with plain, uncomplicated HTML and CSS?
I feel that many web developers don't realise that simple HTML and CSS is often all you need to make clear, fast loading pages. No complicated tricks or techniques required. You can make the page reasonably pleasant in appearance too.
Think of the sites you often visit: news stories, blogs, magazine-style sites, discussion sites. These are mostly text, not web apps.
I hope I'm not hijacking this thread, but I'd like to ask if readers find the web page links below fast to load on their mobile phones? They don't use AMP.
I created the pages below as a test because I was (and still am) frustrated by the slow page-loading speeds when using my phone with a 3G connection.
The page links below represent a common article/blog/report style of page. There's about 2500+ words on the page.
The page content is CC licensed but the pictures from the original synopsis are not included despite the references in the text (since this was just a test)
For startups and SaaS websites this layout template is instantly recognisable. Is it a cookie-cutter approach to website design? Or a boring but reliable layout template?