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How to Design for the Modern Web
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- boffinism 8y agoHow glorious that to read this I had to duck under a 'download the medium app' popup and hop over a 'sign up to premium' popup. Always good to see dogfooding.
- lymitshn 8y agoYou might find this useful[0], basically removes clutter. Found on some recent topic. [0] http://outline.com/3JqpTH http://outline.com/3JqpTH
- forgotmypw 8y agoWith JS disabled, this page comes up blank.
- caspervonb 8y agoWould have been funnier if you came from Reddit mobile... ;-)
- redefineminimal 8y agoThis is a really good assessment for why I don't use the internet as much as I use to or at least the websites I frequent have become ones that aren't bloated and unusable.
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- forkLding 8y agoLinkedin.com is one of the worst offenders here, I avoid using that site because of it.
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- jjbinx007 8y agoThere's a lot to be said for sites like this: http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en It's fast, non intrusive and just gives you the information you want without the annoyances. It also works far better for disabled people. I know some partially sighted people and some websites are a no-go now as screen readers can't cope
- ChrisSD 8y agoSure but that could never be the main view. It goes too extreme in the other direction. Which is great for some use cases. But the mainstream will want things like search, categorisation and even images. So while a "lite" view is good, I'd like websites to improve their main views so they are fast and work well with screen readers and other assistive technologies. We have the technology, if not the will.
- roter 8y agoI too find this useful on an old Blackberry phone, along with NPR[0]. Unfortunately, I've found that the CNN site no longer seems to get updated daily. [0] https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
- lucideer 8y agoBrilliantly, the NPR text site is what you get if you reject their GDRP popup, so one would hope they continue to update it.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agowhew boy, I love this
- Numberwang 8y agoThis is amazing. Is there a BBC version as well (which would fix not just the design, but also the content)?
- exotree 8y agoWould you pay for it to be the default and make up for the lost ad revenue?
- zebraflask 8y agoHow tongue-in-cheek. Love it.
- 3pt14159 8y agoThis is a bit glib, I know, but my method of not needing to show an annoying cookies box on my personal website was to... Not use cookies. Or analytics. Or third party fonts. Or even JavaScript—I just haven't needed it yet. It's just a content site; why bother? I bought some fonts I could host myself. Bought a base CSS / HTML template for so cheap I kinda felt bad about it. Did some edits to the template. I also had a blind person to review the site with their screen reader and we pleased when they came back saying it was one of the best they'd ever, uh, heard? I host my own images too. It's all first party and it honestly feels great to focus on the content rather than stress about random numbers on an analytics dashboard. I have no idea how many reads the stuff has, but people are translating[0] articles for free and requesting RSS feeds. (Which I also quickly coded up. Did I mention I rolled my own static site compiler too? Ruby is really great at this kind of thing.) The only thing I don't like right now is that I don't have an easy way to write first drafts and have them edited unless I want to shuffle the data from something like Google Docs. In an ideal world I'd pay my editor to learn the markdown inspired template language I created[1] and how to run a pull request in GitHub. [0] Never did I expect someone to offer to translate something for me for free; let alone into languages as obscure as Uzbek. [1] Markdown is great, but if you want to make content that's more HTML-y with ease I find it gets out of the way too quickly. I want to be able to open a <blockquote> and not have to put a bunch of paragraph tags in there.
- raphlinus 8y agoI'm with you, I don't cookie up any of my websites and have no intention of doing so. (Right now, my sites are super-primitive; my main one I've had for 22 years or so, but I'll be doing more). But I do need to say that third-party fonts are not the problem here, or shouldn't be. Neither Google Fonts[1] nor Typekit[2] sets cookies. I don't know off the top of my hand if any of the other services do, but if so I would agree it's a good reason not to use them. Disclosure: I helped launch Google Fonts and was involved in the decisions to make it privacy-friendly. [1] https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_... [2] https://www.adobe.com/privacy/policies/typekit.html https://www.adobe.com/privacy/policies/typekit.html
- HNLogInShit 8y agoHe forgot DISABLE ZOOMING on mobile browsers!
- SllX 8y agoMedium is doing a great job on the web design front already! Reading on my laptop, there was a fixed header taking up about 10-15% of my screen height (in fullscreen), a fixed social networking sidebar on the left and a lovely dialog box attached to the bottom of the screen letting me know I can subscribe to Medium for $5/month. Best part about that bottom bar is that just in case I haven't subscribed when I closed it out, it is more than happy to show up after a few minutes when I've switched back to the tab, as it did while I was composing this commentary. Really helps the readability of the website, which I especially appreciate on a website devoted entirely to reading. Really makes me wonder why Firefox even bothers with a Reader mode when we have high quality web design like this! Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago^/s
- lowtolerance 8y agoIt’s impossible to read any article regarding web design on Medium without having to seriously question whether it’s intended to be satire or not.
- cryptozeus 8y agoThis.. “Don’t know anything about web development at all? Don’t worry you can just take a week long bootcamp! Already a web developer? Buy the C programming language book here and get out while you still can.”
- anonytrary 8y agoThe article in this post is clearly satire.
- Pxtl 8y agoYup. I like to hold my phone landscape. The overlays reduced the viewing area to a single line of text. Closed the tab.
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- nuthersox 8y ago> Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete nope! hosting your own site on your hardware puts you in control of your site, i wouldnt hand my house keys over to a housing co-op you shouldnt let someone talk us into doing that to the web.
- projectramo 8y agoWait: block all visitors from Europe instead of making changes to your site? Nobody had an issue with that? I can’t believe this hasn’t been commented on.
- burlesona 8y agoThe linked post is definitely satire.
- projectramo 8y agoSo embarrassed that I didn’t pick up on that the first time. I assumed they were kidding sometimes but not the whole thing.
- caspervonb 8y agoPoe's law in action, not sure what this says about Medium content in general.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago1. The article is satire. 2. This is HackerNews. 99% of us work for companies with free products subsidized by overt tracking and complete disregard of user privacy.
- caspervonb 8y ago> 99% of us work for companies with free products subsidized by overt tracking and complete disregard of user privacy. Indeed, also security but that's for another rant.
- kyle-rb 8y agoI feel like blocking European users should return a 451 error, "Unavailable for legal reasons"
- matt4077 8y agoI'm not sure if these decisions are purely based on legal (and financial) reasons. After all, there are now countless examples of how be compliant. The only group of websites that I have encountered blocking me are small-town newspapers in the US, mostly the south. Compliance is almost trivial for a newspaper website that does not ask for any data. My suspicion, especially considering the regional distribution of these blocks, is that some of these decisions may be driven by politics more than anything. Plus, of course, the possibility that a low-quality rural newspaper can count their European visitors on one hand.
- caspervonb 8y agoNot sure what lead certain sites to take that path, but the real issue IMHO wasn't really a legal one but rather that the site owner was indeed a teapot.
- riantogo 8y agoOne tip that is not covered: If the user already has the app installed, right on top show some message like, "you can only read 2 more exclusive articles this month", which expands to some marketing speak and option to pay $50. This will make the user immediately run for their wallet and subscribe. I just noticed that Medium has this down.
- worik 8y agoIs this a joke? I quote: "A neat little trick is to make the link to close the modal small and put it very close to the link that lets the user install the application. This will make users much more happy as it’s so easy to install the application and not accidentally close the dialogue!" Go away with your concept of the "modern web". I must be post modern as I do not install random apps. What a stupid horrible negative pattern!
- nithinm 8y agoDude this is a satire
- caspervonb 8y ago> Is this a joke? The post, yes it's a joke but reality is just as sad, Reddit, Medium, Facebook, Linkedin etc all do this kind of crap.
- anonytrary 8y agoDo people not realize that this is satire?
- caspervonb 8y agoWith 150 000 reads so far, I hope most do.
- LoSboccacc 8y agoit's basically a 1:1 a description of reddit
- jayflux 8y agoDidn’t realise Europeans couldn’t use reddit
- caspervonb 8y agoMostly news sites did that from my experience, I just found it ironic with how Americans stereotypically shout freedom of speech at every opportunity and then news outlets turn around with "Oh you're European, can't read our news". Reddit's mobile website truly hates itself tho.
- Avamander 8y agoCertain subreddits are banned in Germany AFAIK.
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- mrep 8y agoOh man, I just found a new one on the Seattle times mobile [0]. They have a sign up for their newsletter pop up on the bottom of the screen and clicking the x to close it flashes the sign up button and does not close it. You can just keep pressing the close button and all it does is flash the sign up button. [0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/is-seattles-homeless-crisis-the-worst-in-the-country/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/is-seattl...
- bausshf 8y agoI could close it properly.