Re: Potential improvements to the homepage?

[Karlin High]

On 8/21/2016 4:19 AM, Andrew Yoon wrote:
> Nothing dramatic or web3.0 style of course.

I have a pet peeve about websites that are so slick and responsive that 
it becomes a real challenge to find anything on them. The site for a 
certain popular-in-USA accounting software company comes to mind. 
("What, they changed their site again? Where'd they hide element X this 
time? Important info, been depending on it for years... gotta be here 
somewhere.")

Apparently I'm not alone in this; here's Basecamp's Jason Fried writing 
in Inc. magazine. To me, it seems like an echo of LilyPond's 
text-centric design philosophy.

"But when I look at what's hot in Web design these days, I'm turned off. 
It's all a bit too slick, a little overdesigned. I'm sick of slick.

"Most of these designs can be described like this: First, you see a huge 
photo with some text over it. Then, as you scroll down, the background 
slides away and another big photo with more text on it pops up. And so 
on.... Maybe you've seen this style--it's starting to crop up 
everywhere. To a designer's eye, it looks good, and it's technically 
impressive, but I'm not sure it says anything meaningful about the 
companies using it. Worse (for those companies), it's created a new kind 
of clutter: Too many companies look the same--all style and not enough 
substance.

...

"I've always found it interesting that some of the most popular sites on 
the Web--Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, to name a few--are often 
very heavy on the text and very light on the imagery. These sites won't 
win any design awards, but they seem to communicate very clearly to 
their intended audience. They don't try too hard; they just are what 
they are. There's no shame in that."

Full article: 
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201404/jason-fried/do-not-overdesign-your-website.html

And, the non-overdesigned Basecamp website: https://basecamp.com/about
--
Karlin High
Missouri, USA