Great Website Design Inspiration

I've seen a lot of people here looking for inspiration. I've found a website for just that.

http://www.thebestdesigns.com/

I myself have gotten some great ideas out of some of these websites.

Have fun!

 

Funny since most of those are poster children for how NOT to build a website. Inaccessible pretty trash that really has no business even being put online.

But then I've found that most 'great design' also means 'piss poor accessibility and functionality'.

I mean actually try to visit some of those sites -- loving the two minute page loads, broken layouts on anything other than the magical combination of resolution and screen size they happen to have been designed at, endless pointless scripting and "gee ain't it neat" gimmicks making page navigation and general functionality completely counterintuitive -- and don't even get me STARTED about the inaccessible rubbish code under the hood.

Some of them are even so mind-numbingly bad on the gimmicks you end up having to zoom out to 10% original size thanks to that stupid malfing "font scaling to width" trick that results in barely fitting one word on the page.

Again, another site that's a laundry list of how not to build websites, crapped together by the "But I can do it in photoshop and with javascript" scam artists and halfwits... shame they're so flashy and pretty though, as the ignorant twits in the suits will write them a check without even questioning "Yeah, but what good is it to visitors?"

YES, they are very pretty and qualify as attractive design -- but if they are useless to anyone trying to actually use the pages as websites, what good are they? Again why you will never see that type of asshattery on an actually successful website.

 

Completely agree. The only purpose of this thread is to show only the visual aspects of some of these websites as, let's face it, they do look nice.

 

Can you, deathshadow, kindly please show us some examples that follows this strict code of conduct and beautiful at the same time.

It'll be nice if you could put up a gallery of these sites you know. I could always use it to set an example to the others who requires help. Together we can make the Internet clean.

 

I'm not entirely convinced the two are compatible... Let's just say I suspect there's a REASON the big success stories of the Internet do NOT have anything remotely resembling "beautiful design".

... and the sites I used to point at -- like say Google, have been pissing their own bed for about four years now. Pretty much ever since they added all the annoying javascript, STOPPED supporting CSS off users, and added the inaccessible pile of crap black bar/menu across the top.

Unless you have a time machine back four years, I doubt you could find one... The two damned near seem mutually exclusive. I've seen very attractive 'design' and I've seen very accessible sites. I'm not saying the accessible sites are unattractive, but they'd never win a beauty contest either... and I put my own work in that category.

The more you let the PSD jockey piss on it with their very pretty but ultimately useless crap, the less useful the page ends up. The more you let the script-tard piss on it with their goofy animated garbage or worse, crapping on pages with things that don't work scripting off -- the less useful the page ends up... So I'm not convinced you can have both; it's more about finding a middle-ground.

 

I think in the end its the end-user. If our grandma can navigate, then it's ok already. The invention of technology is to make things easier. Backends are optimized over time. For example the cars we're driving.

In the early stages, engines were terrible, with loud sounds and shit. Now its so quiet, we don't even know the engine is running. The drivers, they don't know how to build the engines and its smallest detail of technology and what it took to create such engines.

They just drive to their destination. They look for comfort, safety and such. Same goes to web users. If the site is accessible, useful and full of great content, they will stick to it, like YouTube. The developers behind it are working hard to make it more accessible — they discarded Flash technology, HD Content, lesser CPU consumption — things the users won't even notice because they only know how to drive. YouTube can stick to its old tech, but the world is moving forward.

A prophet quoted — The best of humans, who better themselves today than yesterday, and better themselves tomorrow than today.