You might be wondering why does my website look so … basic? I’m a web developer, I should be able to spruce things up a bit, make it look a little nicer, right?
I could, but it is an intentional choice, let me explain why.
It is 2024 when I write this, and I started doing Web Development as a full time job back in 2013. Just over a decade of work in this business. I’ve seen a few different trends in web development, and been caught up before in the excitement of a “new” thing. But the longer you watch and observe, the more it looks like cycles. What was old becomes new again. Design philosophy is closer to fashion than science.
Simplicity and Function
The design you see here on the website is an extreme version of my favorite kind of design style: simplicity and function.
I love when web pages work. In the very simple sense, they deliver content that you want, and nothing gets in the way of the content you want. Most large websites do not do this. Sometimes they can’t, sometimes they choose not to. I’ll pick on YouTube for a second to demonstrate:
If you want to go to YouTube and just watch short clips endlessly, or watch the latest videos from channels you follow it makes this very easy. Those videos and short clips show up on your home screen, and they show up after each video you’ve watched has completed. This is an example of YouTube working. You have something you want, YouTube delivers.
The advertisement that plays in front of a video is an example of YouTube choosing (for obvious business reasons) to stop their website from working to give you what you want. That advertisement is something most people don’t want. There are other “features” that some people want and others don’t. I don’t care for the “social” features of YouTube. The comments section, “likes”, etc are all irrelevant to me. Some people love the community of YouTube and those features are important to them.
This is where I consider myself a little different from others. I tend to prefer websites with fewer core “things” that they are doing for you. I want a website to do the one thing, and I want it to do that thing well.
An old example of this philosophy difference is Yahoo! vs Google. Yahoo! wanted to offer everything under the sun. Google just wanted to offer search. They’ve kept their design philosophies constant over the years, I took theses screenshots today:
My Website
Back to what I’m doing here. This is a stripped down version of a website. It was offered as a design template. I think the trend has swung back in favor of simplicity lately, because of the success of websites like Substack. Simplicity and singular purpose websites also tend to work better on mobile. When screen space is at a premium web designers and developers need to carefully choose what comes up. Imagine trying to develop the mobile web version for the yahoo page and the mobile version for the google page.
This is ultimately just what I like better. It’s a personal preference. For the world outside the web, I like products that do the one thing well. I don’t want a fridge with a smart screen that tells me the weather, or lets me add to my shopping list. I just want it to keep my food cold.
This website is here to tell you who I am, share some of my work, and give you some insight into how I think. Things like pictures and colors are just a distraction from that.