Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites.
I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article.
Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.
100%. I used to work at a studio specifically targeting winning awards with awwwards and it's definitely not the same as working on the normal web. Flashiness is way more important than performance there, be it in UX, conversions or load times.
It was a good space to play around with things like animations and webgl, but turns out that if your business needs to convert, those things can often come in the way of that.
Look at any corporate site, all of them have the same structure - big text and images, animations as you scroll and unsuitable for viewing on slightly older devices.
10th: no resemblance whatsoever, enormous unforced usability problems (e.g. scrolljacking).
9th: grossly unusable, no resemblance whatsoever. Exemplar of the worst excesses of a highly-ranked Awwwards site.
8th: a lot of resemblance, but the “interesting” parts are the bad parts.
7th: see 8th.
6th: superficial resemblance, but with far more problems due to being “interesting”.
5th: no real resemblance, bad scrolljacking problems.
4th: see 5th.
Long-known-to-be-harmful trends like scrolljacking and replacing the cursor (probably with a `backdrop-filter: invert(1)` circle, these days) seem to appear on well more than half of the Awwwards site; but they are fortunately rare on the web at large.
I’m not saying corporate sites are without problems—“yes, things are stupidly bad”—but the persistent stupidity that is scroll-linked entrance animations are a very different kettle of fish from the problems of a typical Awwwards site.
Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3].
0. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte...
1. https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics
2. https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript
3. https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280...
I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated".
The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous.
Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables.
If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true:
1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use
and
2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.
> Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales.
In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight).
The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world
Usability is.
If you have a website with excellent UX, but it’s massively bloated and has noticeably slow load times on anything less than a 1 Gbps connection, that’s making for a frustrating experience for a large swath of your users (though maybe you also are targeting a niche crowd and know that they all have adequate internet speed).
It’s also possible to have both. McMaster-Carr [0] had its web dev moment last year when tech influencers rediscovered what basic performance optimizations can do, but hype aside, it’s legitimately good design (to me). It’s simple, intuitive, and fast. It’s nothing it doesn’t need to be.
you kinda need the one to get the other in the decent place, even if it is not the only one.
Lack of performance WILL turn every design into mediocre or worse
Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
Just a sad state of affairs overall.
I pretty much set everything I can to dark mode these days, so personally don't agree with white backgrounds in general.
I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not running flash like it’s the early 2000s.
Another thing is maintability. Working with single-file components with state management systems is just a pleasure.
Awwwards websites are pretty much exclusively web design agency sites. These are selling the services of those agencies, which lean towards art direction, graphic design and video production. Nobody is hiring them to build the marketing website for Stripe, or Shopify or Astro or whatever else lies in the boring world of cookie-cutter SaaS sites.
There was a time when sites were created purely for artistic reasons and would get awards, which encouraged visitors to check those sites out. That era of the web has been over for at least 15 years, or roughly when Flash gave up the ghost. Since then, web design became about how fast it could get you to hit the "Sign Up / Buy / Subscribe" button. And it turns out, they're still very heavy bandwidth-wise, only instead of interesting interaction design, the heft comes from the JS frameworks and invisible analytics scripts running underneath the hood.
I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.
As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.
Perhaps it's the people?
I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
The page I did was less than 4K with all content and css embedded and took me 10 minutes.
There's doing the job and there's costing the company a boat load of money doing the job.
It wasn't unusual to reject some designs due to weight. 500 Kb tops at the begging, so degraded backgrounds were a no-go.
I think a much bigger problem are the endless ads, pop-ups, distracting animations etc.
seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business decision and to get on with their day
disclosures i am the grug brained dev of https://harcstack.org which is trying to leverage HTMX to make the pain go away
> The web exists to connect people and share information. Let's not confuse it with an art gallery.
websites are art
I've referred to this as "CV driven development". Although to be fair that developer that designs a microservice architecture for 50 users is not better either.
But on the whole, I don't agree with the title. My feeling is - overall - pages have become a lot less gimmicky than they used to be.
There is no one true way to prioritize design in all contexts. That defeats the point of design: highly-contextualized problem solving.
In some contexts simplicity and speed are not the highest priorities; memorability is.
complete website now weighs 15.9 MB - 14.5 MB is images (395 including responsive versions plus fallback twin). The index page now has a total of 558KB while the same page in the old WP site clocks 21MB - (5.7MB for the 4 images) which it loads in steps 8MB - then 17MB and jumping to final 21MB when I move the cursor from the reload button over to the page.
I'm mindful of performance on the sites I make but I also don't want the entire internet to prioritize shopping basket conversions. Some whimsy can be good.
This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.
Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder...
And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.
