Simple vs Complex with Webpages

Technocrat

Simple vs Complex with Webpages

zogger

Sat Jun 07 18:04:00 -0700 2008

Politics.

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One of the longest running and successful "simple" websites out there is the DrudgeReport. An article that analyzes why that site remains so popular in the days of Flash and assorted other page busy-ness.

ed.z.: Simple, easy to navigate, no hoop jumping to get to the content, a variety of good and timely links all the time. And it still works great with dialup, something that is being lost rapidly with the bulk of the web now. Technocrat works good on dialup, and surprisingly Slashdot still does as long as I have scripting and images turned off and stick to the lower-bloat version. Turn them on, page views might take a whole minute or more to load and frankly, it looks...ehh, nothing nice to say so I won't. Guess I like simple. If I *want* to go to the movies I will go to the movies, I don't need every website to be "the movies" with stuff jumping around and changing and all sorts of blinking moving stuff. Perhaps comparing them to the movies is a bad analogy, better is a lot of websites now look like *videogames*. Shiny, fast, action, look over here! No here! No, there! blah...

.."For one thing, where his site's spare design is concerned, Drudge seems to adhere to the utopian ideal of openness and interconnectedness that the web was founded on. All he is doing is telling people what he thinks is news, and they can either come back his way or not. In this sense, Drudge has a kinship with Craig Newmark of Craigslist, who has also strived to keep his classified site as plain and straightforward as possible. The simplicity also might invite comparison to Google, but based on some of the tart stories Drudge has posted about the search giant - yesterday he highlighted its "close ties" to NASA in a real estate deal - that is an invitation he would probably put in the waste bucket."

Simple vs Complex with Webpages

pojo

Sat Jun 07 19:14:23 -0700 2008
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I personally find The DrudgeReport confusing and poorly designed. What the heck is the column of names that he has in the middle of the page that starts: Matt Drudge, 3 AM Girl, Cindy Adams etc. He self links to his own page on several of the stories and there is no further information other than a picture and the link to himself.

He is a news aggregation site, yet he has no RSS feed available on the site (you have to go to an archive site not even controlled by Drudge, and that site has many duplicates of the same stories as they get updated).

I wouldn't use the word "simple" to describe it. Perhaps, "technologically simple" since all it is a few img tags and a thousand links.

Simple vs Complex with Webpages

Clive Page

Sun Jun 08 01:44:11 -0700 2008
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I don't find the Drudge Report all that nice to look at, or easy to navigate either. Why put all those images on the front page? To me it's just a mess.

In my opinion a much better looking site which is also easier to navigate is Arts & Letters Daily (aldaily.com). Its sibling sites SciTech daily and Climate Debate Daily are similar but not quite as good.

Funny you should mention that

wowbagger

Sun Jun 08 05:04:58 -0700 2008
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Funny you should mention "simple vs. complex" given the recent changes in Technocrat. While I approve of most of them, I don't like the fact that you have to have Javascript active now in order to get the sidebars (and that they don't seem to render reliably under FF3.0, or that I have to tell Adblock and Noscript to allow objects and scripts for Technocrat).

There are places where Javascript is a real boon to a web page: I have a little image viewer I wrote that, if Javascript is active, allows changing the image with the only fetch from the server being the new page, and that loads the new image "in the background" and then does the image swap "atomically" so that the user just sees a switch of images, and that insures the image is displayed as large as is possible within the browser window without changing the image aspect ratio.

However, that image viewer will degrade to operate without Javascript: you will do a full page refresh when changing images, the images won't be resized, etc. That's my pet peeve with most web pages which use Javascript: they don't degrade gracefully, they just DIE.

Funny you should mention that

President4242

Sun Jun 08 14:59:19 -0700 2008
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And in Firefox, the "stories you haven't read yet" feature seems to be working rather strangely- it keeps coming up with stories I have already read, and the list appears to be different on a comments page than on the front page.

Simple vs Complex with Webpages

Petr Mareš

Sun Jun 08 06:39:22 -0700 2008
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From my point of view, animated and colorful pages are aimed at uncreative or futile people, which are to be pleased -- customers, procurists, journalists. Such pages have it's value in being "looking good" for the first glimpse. It sells better.

So, although I respect the need for eye candy stuff, I recognize that it is the indication of untechnical management stearing the creation of the software and (lead by ample experience) I evade using such programs.

Great minds could design simple interfaces.

Simple vs Complex with Webpages

N. Dan Smith

Mon Jun 09 08:25:16 -0700 2008
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Well, I would hardly hold up The Website Which Must Not Be Named as a paragon in any sense, I think there is something to be said for the good old Web .09rc3 way of doing things. And no, I am not talking about Angelfire and animated GIFs. Static webpages come to mind. The dependance on client-side scripting is really ruining the enjoyment of certain websites for those of us who use older hardware. That is one of the things I like about Planet - it is dynamically generated (which is a must these days) on the server side. No, there is no AJAXy cuteness, but you end up with a solid output which does not bring my 350MHz G3 to its knees.