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Just needs a stock photo of some business people shaking hands, and maybe a pic of a laptop with some code and it's all set.
I hope Will Smith slapping Chris Rock becomes one of the main "teamwork" or "synergy" images.
And it looks totally fine. Thanks for making sure those gates are kept though.

So what should be done to appease you? Add some corporate memphis? Maybe do some cool brutalist stuff that gets designers excited and that no other human being in the world wants?

Add slow scroll hijacking.
Yup, it's a popular template because it looks good and works very reliably.
The page concludes “Honestly this template does look really nice, though.” I’m not really sure what the author’s point is.
Is there a higher point? It seems to be a joke about the prevalence of one particular website style. Sometimes the chicken just needed to get to the other side.
You're watering down the definition of gatekeeping. God forbid someone add snark to an opinion on web homogenization. At least they credit it to looking nice at the end:

> Honestly this template does look really nice, though.

What are the gates in this situation? The gates of design? What do the gates keep out? I'm honestly confused.
Not even close. We're missing at least 27MB of carousel images, an entire mp4 on loop, a 4k 4000x4000 png being displayed at 320x320 and few MB of analytics.
It didn't even hijack the back button or ask me to subscribe to a newsletter.
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You've got some bugs with the nav link highlighting
Don’t bugs that are never going to be fixed make for better satire?
* UNDER CONSTRUCTION * 2022 edition!
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Template looks great - I'm glad everyone uses it versus hand rolling six thousand other ones.
HEY LOOK, IT'S EVERY SUPERMARKET EVER. Huge automatic glass doors, shopping carts, aisles with stuff on shelves. So fucking creative.
Supermarkets really need to get with the times. I mean, barcodes? Please. It's like they're not even trying.
Seriously. We're soooo over 1-d barcodes. Need to get a QR code on all that stuff. MMmmmmm.... Fiducial markers - that's hot
They usually use 2D barcodes for weighed items at the deli.
brb patenting higher dimensional barcodes / tensor barcodes

Finally, we can use holograms for something mundane!

Pretty neat. You can encode 100 megabytes of data in a 4x4x4x4 cm tesseract, just need to apply an appropriate rotation around two of its axes and then you can extract the information as it intersects with 3d space.
That adds an additional temporal component to the scanning process which makes me hesitant.

However, the idea is ridiculous enough to greenlight.

Just go full panopticon with a thousand cameras, so that the looters don't need to put in all that selfie effort.
afaik some of them use quite cool tech - fully automated sensors for just about anything plugged up to complex workflows and whatnot
I mean you joke, but a local sports good store has switched to using RFID tags for all their products. First time I went shopping after the change was rather startling. I dumped my purchases at the cash register and almost immediately the cashier read me the total.

I see no reason supermarkets couldn't do similar once this sort of tech gets prolific enough.

this is a good analogy, in that some supermarkets feel soulless, whereas others feel really cozy, even though ultimately they both have aisles with stuff on shelves. it's like the difference between someone using a template versus making something by hand. there's a human feel to the latter.
I think you both have a good point. I guess it depends on what your relationship you have with food. Do you prefer your shopping experience to be predictable and efficient or do you like to discover something new and exciting.

Realistically, most people who browse the web don't care too much about website design and just want something reasonably functional that's not too ugly.

This is a good point, but it doesn't invalidate the premise. The first sites to use bootstrap and this particular brochure template truly stood out. And today, with everyone using it, it still works okay, well enough to be a bona fide standard, but it of course doesn't work nearly as well as it did for those early adopters.

What I'm saying is, the next big thing, for marketing in particular, may very well be derided in this same "Hey look..." manner after it takes off in popularity, but the pioneers of that next big thing are going to reap serious profits.

or restaurants with plates
Plates are sooooo 2010's if my food isn't served on a wooden board or a tile I'm not even interested.
A wooden board is fine for a charcuterie plate.

But what's ridiculous is breakfast being served on a shovel.

Or a plaster mould of the chef's mouth.

Or spaghetti being just dumped all over the table.

A supermarket isn't designed to sell you on a product.
Supermarkets are literally designed to sell you on products. Every single product placement is from a planogram meant to juice the sales per sqft of space, from which aisle the item appears to which row and where within the row it’s positioned.
They are literally designed to make you buy products. The milk in the back corner is the most famous example so that you have to pass by as much product as possible to get it and have less chance of not impulse buying. End caps…all the candy right next to the checkout lane, etc.
As a previous bagger boy gone stocker gone high-as-a-kite meat dept clerk, the milk is in the back because it is stocked from a walk-in fridge. People don't even buy much milk.
Or you can just walk past the deli and the bread section, like I do at my local Safeway.
I guess I worded it incorrectly. My point was that it's two completely different ways of selling you things. Supermarkets use all these techniques to subconsciously make you buy more things, but they rarely try to sell you a singular product.

Product websites actively try to distinguish themselves, to make you feel that the product is unique and convince you it'll make your life better. Having the same style of website for every product ever feels like something that'd actively go against the goal of the website. After all, if two things look the same, why would I pick one over the other?

I've been an active reader of HN for 5 years and this has to by far be the most wrong comment I have ever seen. Absolutely bone-headed.
Believe me, you're not even trying if that's the most bone-headed comment you've seen on here.
I mean, there are certainly bonehead comments. Any time Jan 6 comes up, conspiracy theorists will come out of the woodwork and say it was a false flag operation done by Antifa or the Deep State. Nearly anything supporting NFTs is bone-headed.

But this one was just baffling on another level. Like...what do you think supermarkets exist for? Just for people to look around and go "Neat! They put a whole chicken in a can!"?[0]

[0] There actually IS a supermarket like that though. It's called Omega Mart, and it's a tourist attraction in Las Vegas. They sell weird shit like a household cleaning spray called "Who Told You This Was Butter? Seriously, Don't Eat This", "Emergency Clams", and a laundry detergent called "Plausible Deniability". But even in the case of Omega Mart, you can still buy all the products.

If you're in the burbs. There's a reason sprawl sucks
Shouldn't there be a popup to subscribe to a newsletter before scrolling 10% of the content?
It'll pop up when it sees the mouse pointer move up the page to the back button/URL bar.
That comes up when you scroll down 4 pixels and can't be exited out without giving a BS email address.
Not bad to be honest. If you replace that font with something like IBM Plex and fix those horrific buttons it's a cool template.
Who cares? If it works, use it.
Yeah, I hate flashy websites. I rather go with boring than distracting.
And the various browsers have their own default styles for everything including buttons, inputs, paragraphs. Lets use those again instead!
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The best part is at the very bottom they say

> Honestly this template does look really nice, though.

It would have been nice if they'd have provided a download link or github repo so I could use this as a template to quickly launch new sites.
Looks like it was copied, no idea if it's the same owner or not.

> <!-- Mirrored from adventurega.me/bootstrap/ by HTTrack Website Copier/3.x [XR&CO'2014], Sun, 01 May 2016 13:01:33 GMT -->

The phone number at the bottom of the page seems to be a legitimate phone number for "Berg Consulting and Technology Leadership" in Wisconsin, US.

Hopefully that is actually the site owner's number and not someone else's.

It is actually his phone number, the website (dagusa.com) is on the same IP as report.ly, which is the real mailto right next to it. The same phone number is on that page.
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This template looks great actually. I think I'll use it for my next random website project.
This conflates websites as a medium of art or personal expression vs websites as a medium of business communication. For the latter, I just want to get the point across quickly and painlessly. For the former, everyone is welcome to design whatever they want and consume as much time is required.
No, truly utilitarian websites look and function like this: https://smxi.org/docs/inxi.htm

The template in the article is exact opposite. It conveys bloat, unoriginality and impedes efficient communication of information.

Yeah, but they don't sell to a very wide audience. It needs to look nice, not unique.
Yeah but outside of HN, that is probably considered dated/ugly.
That's not my point. I am responding to OP that if we don't care about dated/ugly/not-unique/fashion/medium-of-expression/art/etc, then inxi website does the job better than the template.
That’s not all that functional. The only two links I clicked, changelog and cli options, are just copy and pasted as preformated text that scrolls horizontally.

Putting zero thought behind UX isn’t the pinnacle of UX despite what we celebrate on HN.

Here's the thing, that website doesn't actually efficiently communicate as well as you think it does.

Information hierarchies have a bunch of channels to get the reader to understand what's important and what's not. Text size, color, motion, placement, rotation, contrast, images, etc. all contribute to drawing the eye to key pieces of information.

The link you presented is simple, yes, but the information hierarchy is nearly flat. It presents all the information as equally important by reducing the channels for information transmission it uses.

Our eyes focus on certain details because we have monkey brains that have been trained to pattern match certain things.

I am not convinced. It does a far better job of organizing information in my opinion. Clear, concise, zero bullshit.
Ok. I'm sorry you aren't convinced.

Here are some resources to educate yourself:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visual-hierarchy-ux-definit...

https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/information-architecture/...

https://uxplanet.org/visual-hierarchy-and-ux-design-a-guide-...

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/visual-...

https://guides.lib.wayne.edu/iaux

It's a field of study that has research to back it up. It's great you find that link legible, but most people would not. Even most developers would find it helpful to tweak whitespace, use headers, and layout the content a little more structured to improve legibility.

Most of the UX studies are subjectivism dressed as objectivism.

The entire field is like nutrition or fitness, 90% of it is bogus and made up. None of these studies have proper controlled experiments while still trying to appear as authoritative.

No one takes a step back and realize that physical books are an interface and so is your kitchen. Photons hitting your eyeballs have no clue if it came from a computer monitor or the world around you. Organizing visual information is far deeper than these "UI/UX" experts.

I don't understand the infatuation with obscure irrelevant studies to make a point. None of these are remotely relevant to the page in question. Linking to sources isn't a way to escape basic common sense scrunity.
Basic common sense says the site has poor visual hierarchy. These links in the past several posts have been to highlight that the common sense understanding is that it has poor visual hierarchy.

The basic scrutiny agrees with me, and the sources are to help provide both subjective and objective reference that shows that, yes, the common person would prefer a more structured layout.

None of those back up your assertions about the linked website, which has very clear information hierarchy. Category nav links at the top. Key topic links in a list and sublists (how's that for hierarchy?). The information hierarchy is easy to see and navigate, much unlike modern websites which mislead the reader with a lot of irrelevant images and layouts.
The limited site is like 4 blobs of text with equal weight. Yes, it has a nav bar, but it's not at all trying to emphasize the key takeaways.
If you have your business website look like that then you are gonna lose a lot of customers before they even start reading. It looks like it's from the 90s
https://berkshirehathaway.com/

If you're talking about a business that needs to market to customers through a website; I agree with you.

But I thought OP is talking about efficient communication which I what I responded to. Every comment response is completely misunderstanding where I am coming from.

>> No, truly utilitarian websites look and function like this: https://smxi.org/docs/inxi.htm

To some extent, the majority determines what is utilitarian. Once Bootstrap achieved mass familiarity, it became utilitarian -- because almost everyone knows how to interact with it, the flow, the location of the information.

I checked out the site you shared -- it is indeed utilitarian...but it is also unfamiliar and hence to me, it makes it more difficult to find the required information at a glance.

while I agree with you in theory, As a business operator, i'd rather win the customer than win the academic debate.

I’ve used bootstrap themes successfully quite a few times for internal applications.

I just pick something that uses stock bootstrap and adjust the colors, shapes, sizes, and font to taste. Add some extra utility classes or widgets. Maybe an icon library and a logo or two. If you’re looking for it, you may notice it’s bootstrap. At least it looks like someone put work into it.

This is now Tailwind. Purple everywhere!
https://proton.me/

Honestly, the only reason I am not using ProtonMail is because of the gaudi colors. There is a serious lack of Swiss-ness in their design; aesthetically and functionally.

I use protonmail for my personal user and haven't seen the homepage in while. Thanks for sharing this.
I thought they used that purple for examples because it --should-- stop people from copy-pasting examples without making at least that one modification. That you could not paste that into your site and think, "Oh, that's good. Just like that."
Thank you for showing me this! I am looking to build an internal tool for a tech team and was thinking of what framework to use to make it look something simple but post-1995. It was going to be Bootstrap but I'd never seen Tailwind before.

The author is trying to be funny, but newsflash: Most people want to get shit done.

It's a shame that Foundation withered. Their CSS framework is vastly superior to Bootstrap.
In my view the main issue with Foundation was the documentation, which is where Bootstrap shines while most other CSS frameworks and pre-baked design systems are generally lacking.
This is amusing as a developer, but there's a reason why Bootstrap is still a thing. It works. And I don't even really like it, to be quite honest. Yet in terms of what it's designed to do, it succeeds. The public doesn't know what Bootstrap is and, with a couple tweaks to the colors and border radii, they won't even notice that they're on a site that's nearly identical to a millon+ other sites.
I go to a bootstrap site and I know what to do. Familiarity is a feature.
I honestly get pretty confused by these websites, usually I have to use ctrl+f to find the content, but often I fail to find what I'm looking for.
UI that does that collapse thing (mobile Wikipedia for the fail!!) causes the find on page feature to become useless.
Does it work? I'm probably not the target audience, but I don't know who would actually read a bootstrap page. It's a few sentences worth of information bloated up in both page space and data.

The first and only thing I do is find the link in the top right that leads to a more traditional page that actually contains useful information (e.g., Docs, FAQs, About).

Same can be said for a lot of tailwind and material ui sites. It’s all the rope to hang yourself with :)