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The most minimalist commercial website you'll ever see
- eykanal 15y agoIt's got all the useful information you may want, with none of the cruft. I'm either amazed or... actually, no, I'm just amazed.
- petervandijck 15y agook I clearly have to clean mine up: http://funkymonkeycorp.com/ http://funkymonkeycorp.com/
- yeahsure 15y agoHey buddy, you might want to check your code. Your index's source is filled with drug-related spam links. Edit: Oh, and by the way, I liked your site a lot better than the OP :-)
- gscott 15y agoAgreed it just crashed my browser trying to send me to a "virus scanner"...
- petervandijck 15y agoOuch, fixed that and hopefully fixed the security breach. Also simplified the site: http://funkymonkeycorp.com/ http://funkymonkeycorp.com/
- yeahsure 15y agoMuch better now! Though I kinda liked the image :) Also, why not have the company name in <h1>? Just an idea though.
- KiwiNige 15y agoFar too often I spend what seems like ages clicking around a store website trying to find where they are and when they are open.
- tgrass 15y agoI love it. Now if restaurants would follow suit. And <br> is the only tag.
- phlux 15y agoActually much like the humans.txt file for sites -- all sites should have a contact.txt file that is modeled after this and has one URL to their address on gmaps. so you could type into your browser: hardknoxcafe.com/contact.txt and get all the info you needed. minimal style.
- phlux 15y agoI like it - it should have a little styling though. Like a nice font. It would also be cool if they had something that indicated really quickly what they did... visually, maybe a picture of a bike, or the store or something. Even better if the picture was animated like those other websites. I like music too - maybe they could play stairway to heaven real loud as soon as I got there. That would be sweet! Maybe they could engage me better if they had the text do something... like use the <blink> tag. I tried to like this on facebook and share it on twitter after wanting to post it to digg -- but the buttons dont seem to load for me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- billforsternz 15y agoNice. I'd love to know what percentage of readers here realize you are joking. Sheldon Cooperism is pretty rampant in these parts, so I am guessing less than 90%.
- mneu 15y agoMobile friendly and everything.
- sukuriant 15y agoThis is a huge point. It really is. So many websites turn me off because they're not mobile friendly when I want to read them. At least this one is. I could go in and get exactly the information I needed, and without 400 redirects and page-reshapings for all the pictures that'd be displayed.
- leeHS 15y agoI love it. Even the font.
- hammock 15y agoThe font is not specified....
- catshirt 15y agoi don't know their audience but i imagine they're leaving opportunities on the table. still, it's better than many commercial sites who try to do more.
- michaelelliot 15y agoThat's not minimalism, that's just lazy.
- petervandijck 15y agoNope, it's minimalism all right :)
- MichaelApproved 15y agoLazy would be hiring someone who creates an ugly flash website that links to a pdf menu which never gets updated.
- kentbuckle 15y agoAre they mutually exclusive? Serious question
- heyrhett 15y agorelevant: http://xkcd.com/773/ http://xkcd.com/773/
- heyrhett 15y agoAlso, this is not bad, considering it's the 8th largest publicly traded company in the world: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
- jeromec 15y agoI think I heard something about Warren Buffet paying the eleven-year-old kid of a relative to put up his site, seriously.
- trafficlight 15y agoThen he did a pretty good job.
- stevenj 15y agoIf you have a source, I'd love to read that story.
- jeromec 15y agoYou know, I believe I read about that on HN long ago. Google is utterly failing me for the lookup, though.
- nicpottier 15y agoMaybe I could appreciate that, maybe, if it weren't for the GEICO ad on there? I can't even take it seriously. If I didn't know what that company was to start out with I would certainly never, ever, invest in them. Which I think means the website absolutely sucks.
- eru 15y agoThat's not the intended audience. They are not going to sell shares on the base of the website alone. The web site is there to inform fans and shareholders. By the way: "If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can either write us at the address shown above or e-mail us at berkshire@berkshirehathaway.com. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."
- jellicle 15y agoI think that's a great commercial website, better than the majority of commercial websites in existence today. I would include several sentences about the business and a photo or two for perfection. "BikeTek sells and repairs all kinds of bicycles, with an emphasis on left-handed 7-wheeled racing bicycles. We maintain an inventory of about 700 bicycles and can get anything you want in stock within a week." I would also probably make it a minimally valid HTML page. But other than that, perfect.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rawsyntax 15y agoYes
- spiralganglion 15y agoWalk into an Apple store and ask for an engraved iPad 2. Insist that you have it in-hand by next week. Tell me how it goes. While you're there, ask for an iPhone 4S. And a flux capacitor. And a dinner date with Steve Jobs and John Scully.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nettdata 15y agoAnd yet it was a correct answer for the question actually asked, not implied.
- teraflop 15y agoIt's already extremely close to being valid HTML5. All it needs is a DOCTYPE declaration and a title; all the rest is optional.
- jtnt 15y agoHa. Of course the first instinct is to start adding stuff to it.
- swah 15y agoSo, what do they do?
- kenjackson 15y agoExactly. I have no idea. Do they sell bikes? Repair bikes? Manufacture them? If they do sell bikes, I think they at the very least need an inventory list. I hate store sites where I can't search to see if you have a product and what the price is. While it is minimal, its about as useful to me a yellow page ad -- which is to say it also has minimal value.
- bigiain 15y agoMy gut feel is that they're probably one of those businesses who, if you don't already know exactly what they do, you're not part of their target market. This is _exactly_ the sort of website I'll suggest if, say, Stradivarius came to me and said "I want a website for my violin building business". If your demand so outstrips your supply that there's no way you need more customers than you're already servicing, why would you need anything more than this for a website?
- blatherard 15y agoI used to live a few blocks away from this place. They sell and service bikes and sell related gear. They're a fairly run-of-the-mill higher-end bike shop.
- swah 15y agoLots of A/B testing went into this.
- famousactress 15y agoLiterally much better than every single restaurant website I've ever had the displeasure of visiting.
- jarin 15y agoEvery time I go to a restaurant that's practically empty, I check the website on my phone and it's always really bad (busy restaurants usually have at least a decent site). The worst part is I often offer to do a redesign for a modest price but they never see the value in it.
- famousactress 15y agoI think it's an interesting issue. I'm not actually convinced that restaurants even really need much of a website, honestly. The busy ones could probably do fine without altogether.. so in some ways, the indifference isn't what surprises me... What surprises me is the unbelievably awful 5,000-10,000$ flash monstrosities that make it basically impossible for me to figure out if you've got egg salad. For me the world is split first into things assist in, or get in the way of me eating egg salad.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Raphael_Amiard 15y agoDoesn't work like that here (Paris but france generally). Most busy restaurants i know don't have a website at all !
- roel_v 15y agoThere are several people on HN who have tried to attack that market, in various ways. I'd be interested if any of reads this how they've fared? It's a hard, hard market...
- jarin 15y ago
- trafnar 15y agoI would link the email address, but other than that, it's nearly perfect. I agree a description of what they do would be helpful. I treat my website the same way: http://nathanmanousos.com/ http://nathanmanousos.com/
- huhtenberg 15y agoWay too much white space at the top :P
- catch404 15y agoI hope that this style catches on - better than the blog templates most people use. Being a bike store I would have thought they'd list brands and specialities though.. It seems the site would only be useful if you know the shop.
- leftnode 15y agoAlready mobile optimized!
- ctdonath 15y agoSo close, and yet so far... Easy enough to make it useful - and look exactly the same - by linking the address to a map, the email to a sendto:, etc. There's a fine line between "minimalist" and "inadequate". We're in 2011; I expect a website be simple yet intuitively, if not proactively, functional.
- eykanal 15y agoWhy bother? I imagine that from their standpoint, a website is a glorified business card. They're not trying to impress or sell you anything, but at the same time they went to the trouble of posting virtually all the useful information you could need. Yes, they could link to google maps, but your business card doesn't do that, so why should their website? If I (re)learned anything from this site, it's that "because it can" is a crappy reason to add features. I'm sure this site serves them very well.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoBecause it's a website. If I expected a business card, I'd ask for a business card. I go to the website because I expect it to give me relevant information. If I go to the website and find that I have to go to Google to search for directions or a map, you lose out on a lot. Number one, I'm no longer primarily thinking about your establishment. Number two, my time is wasted. Number three, as I'm searching Google, it recommends a closer bike shop. It's a webpage, I don't see it unreasonable at all to expect or hope that it has basic webpage features. As a customer, I know that the effort to insert two <a href> tags is microscopic compared to even a small number of customers having to do those actions manually. And if that tiny bit of effort causes even one additional conversion... it seems absolutely worth it. No?
- sliverstorm 15y agoThey're not trying to impress or sell you anything You seem to have forgotten that part. By the way, remember that this is a bicycle shop we're talking about. They probably spend a lot more time thinking about bicycles than SEO or optimizing click-through to visit ratios, and IMHO that's how it should be.
- hammock 15y agoI like it a lot. But I have two changes. 1) fix the non-parallel use of "Thur" - use "Thu" instead or even "Thurs" 2) no need for the "email:" line - just put the email
- atuladhar 15y agoIsn't the email address highly vulnerable to harvesting for spamming purposes?
- ugh 15y agoWho cares? Spam is more or less a solved problem. (Gmail!)
- stevenj 15y agoThis reminded me of a pg quote: “When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.” http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
- pbreit 15y agoHas anyone ever done good research on how a minimalist web site might compare to a fancier version with respect to the various objectives of the site owner? Some other minimalist sites that perform quite well are Hacker News and Craigslist. Have site owners been mis-led into thinking that flashiness equates to credibility or customer satisfaction?
- petervandijck 15y agoIn terms of credibility, there is serious Stanford research that says that "professional" looking sites increase credibility/trust.
- thomasgerbe 15y agoI don't think there's anything wrong with having polished site aesthetics as long as it doesn't sacrifice on the objectives. It's not a zero-sum game.
- hasenj 15y agoI would enlarge the font a bit, put more spacing between lines, and use a sans font. http://jsfiddle.net/wkmhm/ http://jsfiddle.net/wkmhm/
- Raphael 15y agoYou mean sans-serif?
- hasenj 15y agoYea, though I didn't mean a specific font called "sans-serif", just any sans serif font http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif
- BasDirks 15y agoI would make the times more readable thus. http://jsfiddle.net/254EV/ http://jsfiddle.net/254EV/
- fedd 15y agoand add an a-href-mailto to the email address.
- tesseract 15y agoIt doesn't use any font at all. Change your browser default to a sans if that's what you want.
- archenemy 15y agowhat i would really do is to microformat the address and relevant data so i can be sure they're properly crawled and treated. presentation clearly doesn't matter much here.
- decadentcactus 15y agoThat looks like a useful site, thanks!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- code_duck 15y agoWell, it made me want to go look up biketek on Google, so I could find some information about who they are and what they do.
- helipad 15y agoSo this is what it feels like when I hear people discuss art. One side claims it's genius with everything taken away lest only the most pertinent information. Inserts a gobbit from Einstein on minimalism and strokes his beard in awe. The other: it's dumb.
- brok3nmachine 15y agoI expect to find this information without having to leave google maps. Store hours is the only reason I end up going to a website when I need contact information, which I despise having to do.
- kahawe 15y agoWhat I really like about it is you can find their store hours right away; countless shops here have that information very well hidden under unsuspecting links like "about" ("Impressum" in German).
- becomevocal 15y agoYou're missing the point. Its awesomeness is in the fact they're hosting this on an iPod Touch submerged in four gallons of pizza sauce.
- jpanganiban 15y agothat'd be osm! I'll give it a try and keep you posted! haha.
- nato1138 15y agothe source suggests that lazy != minimalist
- smilliken 15y agoI hired the same designer for my personal website: http://scottmilliken.com http://scottmilliken.com
- imwilsonxu 15y agoRemove "email:" to make it more minimal :)
- biketek 15y agoWow. The index page is just a placeholder while the content is completed for the WordPress template I bought on ThemeForest. Frank @ Biketek