My own website, your own critiques

I would like to share with you two websites that I have made and I would be very grateful if you could give me some reviews. Good or bad does not matter. All are acceptable.

http://prosferoumeapokardias.org/

http://marias-restaurant.de/home.html (not entirely completed)

I am also in the middle of a new project, but it is not online yet, so here are some screenshots.

http://prntscr.com/9qy1ju

http://prntscr.com/9qy22o

Thanks a lot

Aristeidis Karavas

 

Hi Aristeidis,
I like the way the sites are put together, very streamlined and uncluttered.
I also like the images you used to convey your message. All-in-all, they are
aesthetically are appealing.

To your success,
SonyaM

 

Thank you a lot Sonya.
God bless you!

Aristeidis K.

 

Hard to say much about the WIP site from some screencaps, but that first one?

Massive images that have no business on a website, massive whitespace and images to cover up a lack of legitimate content, anything that's actually content FAR below the fold, illegible fixed metic (px) fonts, questionable text color contrasts far below WCAG minimums, and ridiculously painful to watch load from the fact that it's a utterly insane 8 megabytes in 46 files... on a page where there's no reason to be using more than probably a third that in number of files apart from the garbage use of scripting frameworks and multiple separate files for nothing.

Peeking under the hood, it's the typical wreck that... hmm, I don't recognize which CMS that is, but it has the telltales of your typical off the shelf garbage doing dumbass things like sending the stylesheets to "all", endless pointless separate stylesheets and scripttardery thanks to a goofy framework asshattery like foundation and jQuery which turn it into laundry lists of how NOT to build a website.

Gibberish heading orders, META no legitimate UA actually cares about, endless pointless classes for nothing, presentational use of classes (again thanks to the idiocy known as "foundation"), comment placements that could be tripping rendering bugs...

It's a laundry list of how NOT to build a website; as evidenced by the RIDICULOUS 29k of markup for 4k of plaintext and less than a dozen content images -- easily TEN TIMES the markup that should have been used. Same goes for the RIDICULOUS 1.8 megabytes of scripttardery on a site that from what I'm seeing shouldn't have more than 16k of scripting in one file... or the even more RIDICULOUS 488k of CSS in 6 files, doing the job of 32k of CSS in ONE file.

My advice, throw that in the trash and take the time to learn to use HTML and CSS correctly WITHOUT the dumbass framework garbage that's just preventing you from learning how to do anything properly. By using foundation you've made more work to create it -- and made it harder to maintain despite whatever wild unfounded claims whoever pointed you at that framework may have made.

Some reading I'd suggest you go through, it explains what I'm saying here in more detail and depth:
http://www.cutcodedown.com/article/whats_wrong_with_YOUR_website_index
http://www.cutcodedown.com/article/HTML_CSS_and_JS_frameworks

 

Technically it is a load of crap that does not validate. I am not going to bother to try and explain the errors if you are too lazy to to spend 30 seconds validating and then fixing the stupid structural crap the no one with any level of competence would accept.

On scale of 1 to 10:
technical: 0
design: 2 (at least you don't throw up popups)
SEO: -3
usability: 1 (it loads)
accessibility -5
content: 0 (if there is nothing about the fold, I am not going to go hunting for it.)
Net score: -5

The 10 year olds I taught at computer camp last summer averaged 7 on a two week project so you are definitelt not smarter than a 5th grader.

 

@deathshadow as i said every rating is acceptable. Your were very harsh so i decided to look for a solution. I just want to remind you that i am only new to this, like 9 months and i have not someone to tell me where to look for those you pointed me to. I cant look for something that i dont know that exists. Anyway. I made some changes to the website and i focused on the SEO (due to @COBOLdinosaur 's comment) and the loading time. I removed the iframe and i replaced with some text. Not much. Just a little bit to raise the content rating. Also i reduced the quality to every image that i have on the slider from 90-97%. I merged some css and javascript files. i removes the custom foundation css and i kept only what i needed. Still i thing it is too much but you are the expert. By the way the CMS that i am using is called Typo3 and it is only known to Germany. Maybe to some other countries too, but it is not like Wordpress. Could you please recommend a SEO tool or any other tool that finds the errors so i would be able to get better to what i am doing?
@COBOLdinosaur i dont understand the reason being so aggressive. I never said i was a pro and that is the reason why i asked for opinions. If i was a pro i wouldn t bother.


Thanks in advance,

Aristeidis

 

Well, you didn't actually say that...

Not seeing much change on that front, but a lot of the garbage HTML it's vomiting up just indicates deeper rooted issues... JavaScript and CSS are usually only as good as the HTML they are applied to, so if the HTML is junk, the style and scripting usually follow.

Even just the simplest of elements on the page like:

 <div class="contain-to-grid">
  <nav class="top-bar" data-topbar data-section data-options="back_text: Πίσω" >
    <ul class="title-area" >
      <li class="name">
        <h1><a href=""><img src="fileadmin/templates/apokardias.org/main/images/hand-1q-title-min__1_.png" alt="prosfroumeLogo"></a></h1>
      </li>
      <li class="toggle-topbar menu-icon"><a href="http://prosferoumeapokardias.org/#">Μενου</a></li>
    </ul>
    <section class="top-bar-section">
      <ul class="right"><li class="has-dropdown">

Code (markup):

Has me shaking my head going "what the ****!?!" -- with the scripttard data attributes on something that shouldn't actually need scripting, list around a non-list element (the H1), nav around non-navigational elements (like the h1 -- NOT that I consider NAV to serve a legitimate purpose on websites -- but that's just part of why HTML 5 and I don't see eye-to-eye), presentational image in the markup with meaningless alt text, empty href that does nothing when it should link home, endless pointless classes for nothing, presentational use of classes....

This ALONE:
class="right"

Shows that whoever made that template has ZERO business making templates.

Looks just as bad from what I'm seeing, though their train-wreck of a website reeking of "WCAG, what's that" would have sent me bouncing away from it before even giving it a try. When they can't even build a proper website for their CMS, it doesn't speak well of their ability to MAKE a CMS.

The best tool is the one between your ears, and that means a lot of reading and learning. If you THINK some automated tool is going to do it for you, you're thinking wrong -- and if you can't accept that idea, it might be time to look at doing something else, or simply living with the shortcomings. 99.9999% of SEO "tools" are 100% grade A farm fresh scam-artists BULLSHIT! SEO is a small but simple part of site development that has for some batshit nutjob reason has turned into a cottage industry filled with sleazy snake-oil doctors talking out their ass -- that much like most of the ignorant fools calling themselves "designers" don't know enough about HTML, CSS, or accessibility to be flapping their yap on the topic.

SEO is simple, there are two major aspects of it - on-site and off-site.

1) ON-SITE SEO
The best advice came from Matt Cutts a decade or so ago: "Write for the visitor, NOT the search engine!" If you are wasting bandwidth adding crap that ONLY serves a purpose for "engines" you are more likely to get slapped down by search than upranked. If you have unique content of value, marked up semantically, maintaining separation of presentation of content, and presented in as fast a loading and accessible a manner as possible, you're golden. To be frank apart from the content of value, you're NOT going to have the rest of that by sleazing together off the shelf solutions. I've NEVER seen it done which is why cookie-cutter CMS generally tend to be stuck as permanent "also ran" in most every category. If it was easy as grabbing existing software and plugging in content, everyone would be doing it and being successful. The only people being successful with that approach are the scam artists duping site owners into THINKING that it works. Like any scam, the only people making the money are the scam artists themselves.

One of the reasons my opinions on this matter are somewhat less than popular; I recognize the scam and call it a scam, I recognize the sleaze and call it sleaze; simply put the vast majority of "developers" and "designers" out there are little more than predators. If such snake oil hoodoo-voodoo continues to have an audience it's the simple fact that there's money to be made taking advantage of people new to having websites. That's why they'll saddle you with something pretty that has next to zero legitimate traffic, manufacture results to make wild claims about how great it's doing, to then pull a Billy Joe and Bobby Sue.

To truly optimize on-site SEO there simply is no automated tool that's going to be worth a flying purple fish apart from the brain of a reasoning educated person. You NEED to understand not just the grammar of HTML, but the intent; Sadly most people are sorely lacking in the latter. Strong in the sword but a bit weak in the scroll and the key, if you catch my meaning.. Concepts like logical document structure, semantic markup (using HTML to say what things ARE, NOT what you want them to look like) and so forth improve "graceful degradation" -- which means not just what the Search Engine gets to work with, but also users on other "non-visual" user agents. Hence why accessibility norms are equally important since semantic markup and accessibility is "Writing the site for ALL visitors" -- not just the ones with the magical perfect combination of eyesight, screen resolution and interface the majority are fortunate enough to have.

It's why things like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) even exists:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php

It also means a passing familiarity with things like usability studies and user experience (ux) is as if not more important than the flashy graphical and goofy scripted nonsense. You read even just a handful of articles over at the Nielsen Norman Group:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/

... and you'll find your eyes opened to concepts you likely never even thought of in terms of a website.

Sadly, ignorance of these things are why most people getting into websites -- and most of the predators taking advantage of them -- do nothing but build sites that turn into money pits inside six months and go under inside a year; long after the predator has "took the money and run".

2) OFF-SITE

Off site SEO is just promotion and marketing. IF you have unique content of value users want, they'll tend to share it with others. This generates what is called "organic backlinks" that will drive traffic to your site. Constantly adding new content will keep that traffic coming back "search optimized" or no, and that traffic, sharing and backlinks are what's truly important. Backlinks are as much a part of your ranking as anything you do on the site, so anything you can do to promote your content elsewhere is good.

When first starting out, and even when new content is added, it helps to "prime the pump" -- share that you have new content on social media and relevant forums, EVEN if those locations create "nofollow" links. It still generates traffic, increasing the odds of conversion -- and simply put the more people that know about your content that are interested in the topics you cover, the higher the odds of someone putting it on their blog or news website with a link that DOES count on search.

A LOT of outright sleazy scam artists will try to pack you so full of sand you could change your name to Sahara on the topic of backlinks and traffic, trying to "sell" you either or both. Legitimate traffic and links MUST be allowed to happen on their own, you go for things like "link farms" or "paid posters" you're just wasting money on something that in the short term may get you a quick boost, but will hobble you greatly in the coming months. Search Engines are always on the lookout for these scams and if they catch you doing it, you can bet your sweet bippy they'll slap you down. Likewise "paid posters" (more of a problem on forums, but you see it in blog comments too) are guaranteed to stand out like a sore thumb to your legitimate users, driving them away from the site. I can think of at least a dozen reasonably successful forums that fell into this trap the past decade, burying them when a new owner came in and fell for one of those "promotional" scams, driving away legitimate users!

As the dread pirate Roberts would say, "Anyone who says differently is selling something."

NOT to stick words @COBOLdinosaur's mouth, but you didn't actually state your level of experience, and to get where you did you either had a lot of really bad experience, or someone put the saddle on you and took you for a ride.

More than than though, A LOT of the reason you'll get somewhat more ... verbally degrading responses is that the experienced people most of whom know better, grow tired year after year or even decade after decade of seeing people being scammed by the same nonsense and seeing sites with good concepts doomed to failure by sleazy, scummy, dirtbags taking advantage of people like yourself, mixed with an equal measure of people not willing to learn or put in the actual WORK to have a successful site.

Far too often the response is "wah, wah, I don't wanna learn" like second rate "math is hard" Barbie dolls... or people will use the bandwagon mentality as their defense; "Millions of people like Wordpress and it's worth a fortune" ... Same could be said of Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, or Miley Cyrus. Doesn't actually make them talented musicians. (As auto-tune has well proven, since without auto-tune Miley and Nicki sound like Milli-Vanilli when they tried to actually sing)

Of course, if you know the 7 core propaganda techniques and how to recognize them -- Bandwagon, transfer, glittering generalities, name calling, plain folks, testimonial and card stacking -- they are present in abundance in all of these off the shelf solutions calling into question the legitimacy of each and every one of them. If you know how to recognize a scam up front, have even the SLIGHTEST knowledge about accessibility, the websites for most off the shelf solutions ALONE should be waving you off... but sadly people who don't know better are so easily swayed by these common techniques that many of these absolute idiotic halfwit steaming piles are reaching cult status. jQuery and bootstrap topping the list of placebo effect BS used by people who don't know enough about the underlying technologies to offer a valid opinion on the topic.

But to be fair, I say the same thing about homeopathy, foodies, anti-vaxxers, and faithtards, so YMMV.

 

Aggressive? Really? You have not read many of my reviews that that was actually pretty soft and friendly.

As for experience, you id not indicate that up front. Now that I am aware of that and seeing your interim results. I will start you with a single piece of device. Throw all the tools an of the shelf third party crap in the garbage. You do not yet have the skills required to evaluate. the crap sandwichs served up by the vendors of sleezeware.

You need exactly three things to learn to build quality web sites:

1. A good quality text editor editor with syntax highlighting (I use programmers Notepad 2)
2. A collection of mainstream browsers for testing. The only way to test is with a browser; not a tool simulating a browser.
3. A commitment to do things the right way and develop personal best practices based on 100% control and responsibility for 100% of the code with your name on it.

I come across harsh and aggressive because I care about the people who ask for help on Q/A sites and I respect them enough to be honest about their efforts; instead of blowing smoke up their ass and kissing them on the cheek so they fell good and like me. Lying to spare feeling does harm to those trying to learn. Anyone who cannot give honest responses because it might be to harsh should just STFU instead of harming those seeking help.

 

@deathshadow thank you for the time you spent on me. If i am not wrong this site CutCodeDown -- Minimalist Semantic Markup is yours or it has something to do about your aspect when it comes to webpage. I can tell from the way you "defended" @COBOLdinosaur that you are on this a few years now, not exactly sure how many but enough to bring the 90s and that is the reason why i respect your opinion. After yours and @COBOLdinosaur comments i now know that i deal with PROs and might be spamming you in the next days on how to build a proper website. First i really need to ask some questions.

1. if i am not wrong this site is not build on cms CutCodeDown -- Minimalist Semantic Markup. Are you not a fan or use any cms at all? If no? Why?
2. Are you not a fan or support Slideshows like the one i have on the website? Nowdays the clients always look for an out of world design (beautiful, unique). And slideshows or a full screen header with a big photo and transparent navigation always make an impression. If not to me, definitely on the clients.
3. Is there not any way to combine your way, with the demands that come from the clients? Meaning Slideshows mega-effects etc...

You were actually right with "to get where you did you either had a lot of really bad experience, or someone put the saddle on you and took you for a ride."
I am in a firm now and i am doing my training. They use Typo3 (that is the reason why i use it) and foundation. They pointed them to me. So i never had someone to show me how exactly is this done.


@COBOLdinosaur thanks for your response too and thank you for trying to make others to be more responsible and better to what they are doing, with your own unique way.

1. i use sublime text 2. I really love the dark background and the contrast that it makes with the code.
2. I use most of the times Chrome but i test the websites on Mozilla and safari too. (i am using a Mac)
3. Well, i thing my knowledge on HTML and CSS3 is pretty decent but i know that it is never enough. That is the reason why i still seek for more and more and i guess that is the reason why i am writing on this forum now.

Thank you both for your honest words and i look forward for your responses.

Aristeidis Karavas

 

It is indeed mine, and is still in its infancy as I only launched it in December.

It's on what a friend who passed away a few years ago called a "Poor Man's CMS" -- it uses PHP to provide a templating system, to tie together options, and to create a "one index to rule them all" approach. No matter what page on the site you visit, it's all routed through a single index.php. So while the content may be static or semi-static files things like the header, menu, sidebars and footers are all added dynamically.

In the case of that site as I'm currently hosting it on a shoestring, I leveraged Disqus for the comments areas so it wasn't consuming my own server load. While I'm not wild about how bloated their scripting is or that it doesn't work when scripting is disabled, it's an adequate solution for the time being.

I'm a fan of the IDEA of a CMS, but I'm just not a fan of any of the off the shelf one's I've ever seen. Universally they seem to be made by people who have no business making websites for others and are completely ignorant of semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, or even the simplest of security. There's a reason I call Wordpress "insecure by design" since it's only got "one ring" of protection, and once you get past that outer gate the keys to the entire blasted thing are left hanging right there. They put the SQL login information into DEFINE for Pete's sake -- you CANNOT get more herpa-freaking-derp than that.

Take this "typo3" thing, and look at their demo page:
http://cms-next.demo.typo3.org/

Inconsistent use of font sizes and typography makes it hard to follow, illegible color contrasts (orange on white), several sections of fixed metric fonts in absurdly undersized measurements, and pathetically broken attempt at being responsive... and that's BEFORE I look at the inept halfwit codebase.

Wasting a class on "no-js" on HTML is back-assward; the class should be added by the script, not present all the time. they've got absolute URI's for **** only knows what, endless pointless meta not one legitimate user agent will use, redundant opengraph values (if the OG: doesn't exist FB is smart enough to fallback on the non OG one, hence why the only OG: meta worth using is OG:image -- the rest are halfwit code bloat), stylesheets being sent to "all" -- I'm so sure that screen media layout is meaningful to print, aural, braille and TTY, blocking script loaded in the <head>, and that's BEFORE I even get past the head...

You get into <body> and it's endless pointless DIV for nothing, endless pointless classes in the mouth-breathing stupid OOCSS manner -- aka "We need a class for EVERYTHING" -- which just pisses all over the markup making it larger, more complex and harder to maintain; but no, Google PageSpeed and CSSLint now actively promote that asshat practice so it must be legitimate. (NOT)

Let's just look at what should be the heading and menu on the page:

<div class="body-bg">
    <a class="sr-only sr-only-focusable" href="#content">
        Skip to main content
    </a>
    <header
    class="navbar navbar-default navbar-has-image navbar-top">
    <div class="container">
        <div class="navbar-header navbar-header-main">
            
                    <a class="navbar-brand navbar-brand-image" href="/1/">
                        <img src="/fileadmin/introduction/images/theme/IntroductionPackage.png" alt="TYPO3 CMS - Introduction Package logo" height="60" width="210">
                    </a>
                
            
                <button class="navbar-toggle collapsed" type="button" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".navbar-collapse">
                    <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span>
                    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                </button>
            
            <span class="navbar-header-border-bottom"></span>
        </div>
        <nav class="navbar-collapse collapse" role="navigation">
            <ul class="nav navbar-nav navbar-main"><li class="active"><a href="/1/" title="Home">Get Started<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/35/" title="Features">Features<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/34/" title="Customizing">Customizing<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li class="dropdown"><a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown">Content Examples<span class="bar"></span><b class="caret"></b></a><ul class="dropdown-menu"><li><a href="/33/" title="Overview">Overview<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/32/" title="Any language, any character">Languages & characters<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/31/" title="Examples of Rich Text">Text<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/30/" title="Headers">Headers<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/29/" title="Text and images">Text and images<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/28/" title="Images with links">Images with links<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/27/" title="Image groups">Image groups<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/26/" title="Image effects">Image effects<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/25/" title="Tables">Tables<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/24/" title="Frames">Frames<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/23/" title="Lists">Lists<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/22/" title="File downloads">File downloads<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/21/" title="Forms">Forms<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/16/" title="News">News<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/15/" title="Site map">Site map<span class="bar"></span></a></li></ul></li><li class="dropdown"><a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown">About<span class="bar"></span><b class="caret"></b></a><ul class="dropdown-menu"><li><a href="/13/" title="Homepage for the Introduction Package of TYPO3">TYPO3<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/12/" title="History">History<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/11/" title="Community">Community<span class="bar"></span></a></li></ul></li><li class="dropdown"><a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown">Resources<span class="bar"></span><b class="caret"></b></a><ul class="dropdown-menu"><li><a href="/9/" title="Open Source">Open Source<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/8/" title="Consultancies">Consultancies<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/7/" title="Documentation">Documentation<span class="bar"></span></a></li><li><a href="/6/" title="TYPO3 Association">TYPO3 Association<span class="bar"></span></a></li></ul></li></ul>
        </nav>
    </div>
</header>

Code (markup):

The skip class is cute, but in HTML 5 it could go before that first DIV, said first DIV isn't doing anything that couldn't be done on body so... it has multiple classes, christmas only knows what for. Said anchor replicates the functionality the NAV tag is SUPPOSED to apply (that nobody has implemented yet!) so why is that a DIV and not a NAV?

The idiotic HTML 5 "header" tag (that is redundant to numbered heading navigation) has endless pointless classes on it reeking of developer ineptitude, more so when it has TWO DIV inside it with even more classes for **** only knows what. It then has a presentational image in the markup doing text inside a H1's job, uses a button tag and a bunch of classes spans to do a checkbox and label's job, finally gets to the NAV tag using it in a pointless manner (like the rest of HTML 5's ALLEGEDLY structural tags it's redundant to existing HTML structural rules -- that nobody follows either.), endless pointless presentational classes on the UL, the confusing "active" class -- big tip on that one, don't use classes that are the same as tagnames or pseudostates. There already IS a :active psuedostate in CSS, so don't make it confusing by using that same word as a class! -- title attributes wasting bandwidth for being identical to the content of the tags or pointlessly different... and of course the URI's are all numeric so *** knows what you are REALLY being linked to. (does it even support user friendly URI'S?)

It's a laundry-list of developer ignorance and ineptitude; to the tune of 3.9k of HTML. Looking at what their page is doing, I see NO reason that same functionality could not have been provided as:

<div id="top"><div class="widthWrapper">
	<a href="#content" class="nonCSS">Skip to main content</a>
	<h1><a href="/">Typo3 CMS <span>Introduction Package</span></a></h1>
	<input type="checkbox" id="menuCheck">
	<label for="menuCheck"></label>
	<ul>
		<li><a href="/" class="current">Get Started</a></li>
		<li><a href="features">Features</a></li>
		<li><a href="customizing">Customizing</a></li>
		<li>
			<span>Content Examples</span>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="overview">Overview</a></li>
				<li><a href="languages">Languages & characters</a></li>
				<li><a href="exampleRTF">Rich Text Format</a></li>
				<li><a href="headers">Headers</a></li>
				<li><a href="textAndImages">Text and images</a></li>
				<li><a href="imagesWithLinks">Images with links</a></li>
				<li><a href="imageGroups">Image groups</a></li>
				<li><a href="imageEffects">Image effects</a></li>
				<li><a href="tables">Tables</a></li>
				<li><a href="frames">Frames</a></li>
				<li><a href="lists">Lists</a></li>
				<li><a href="fileDownloads">File downloads</a></li>
				<li><a href="forms">Forms</a></li>
				<li><a href="news">News</a></li>
				<li><a href="siteMap">Site map</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
		<li>
			<span>About</span>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="introPackage">TYPO3 Introduction Package</a></li>
				<li><a href="history">History</a></li>
				<li><a href="community">Community</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
		<li>
			<span>Resources</span>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="openSource">Open Source</a></li>
				<li><a href="consultancies">Consultancies</a></li>
				<li><a href="documentation">Documentation</a></li>
				<li><a href="association">TYPO3 Association</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
	</ul>
<!-- .widthWrapper, #top --></div></div>

Code (markup):

Which at 1.72k is less than HALF the code! EVERYTHING else being done there should be done in a custom stylesheet, not by attaching a bunch of ignorant halfwit "classes for everything". There are MORE than enough semantic tag hooks in there to NOT need any extra classes. Some "tools" like CSSLint and Google Pagespeed are now actually telling people to use classes in the manner of that first example out of some ignorant nonsensical claim of it "rendering faster".

I liken this to the bull we heard a few years ago from the folks who misinterpreted "don't use tables for layout" as "don't ever use tables" -- the latter NOT what was being said at the time. They started making up excuses about things like, well... rendering speed. In the case of tables if a 386/40 running windows 3.1 and IE 4.0 can render a "table" in an acceptable amount of time, it was a BS claim 15 years ago in the age of 2ghz systems. In that same way if a 133MHZ MMX Pentium running Windows 98 and the "dreadfully slow" IE 5.5 could handle tag selectors in an acceptable amount of time, saying that tag selectors are "slow" enough in the age of multi-ghz handhelds is an ignorant bullshit claim made by people not qualified to even be opening their yaps on the subject -- PARTICULARLY when they are basically telling people to use two to ten times as much code to make it "faster".

The only time "more code" is faster is unrolling loops and inlining copies of the same code so as to skip "jumps" and "far calls" in Machine/Assembly language. Someone tells you to use more code in anything higher level than that is more full of manure than Biff Tannen's '48 Ford Super De Luxe.

"I hate manure..."

You can see the same level of ineptitude in systems like turdpress where there's idiocy like this:

<body class="blog">
<div id="page" class="hfeed site">
	<a class="skip-link screen-reader-text" href="#content">Skip to content</a>

	<div id="sidebar" class="sidebar">
		<header id="masthead" class="site-header" role="banner">
			<div class="site-branding">
										<p class="site-title"><a href="https://livedemo.installatron.com/1453760725wordpress/" rel="home">WordPress Demo</a></p>
											<p class="site-description">Just another WordPress site</p>
									<button class="secondary-toggle">Menu and widgets</button>
			</div><!-- .site-branding -->
		</header><!-- .site-header -->

Code (markup):

Doing the job of this:

<body>
<div id="top">
	<a href="#content" class="nonCSS">Skip to content</a>
	<h1>
		<a href="/1453760725wordpress/">WordPress Demo</a>
		<small>Just another WordPress site</small>
		<input type="checkbox" id="menuCheck">
		<label for="menuCheck"></label>

Code (markup):

or take Joomla with idiocy like:

<body class="site com_content view-featured no-layout no-task itemid-101">

	<!-- Body -->
	<div class="body">
		<div class="container">
			<!-- Header -->
			<header class="header" role="banner">
				<div class="header-inner clearfix">
					<a class="brand pull-left" href="/">
						<span class="site-title" title="Joomla!">Joomla!</span>											</a>
					<div class="header-search pull-right">
						
					</div>
				</div>
			</header>
							<nav class="navigation" role="navigation">
					<div class="navbar pull-left">
						<a class="btn btn-navbar collapsed" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".nav-collapse">
							<span class="icon-bar"></span>
							<span class="icon-bar"></span>
							<span class="icon-bar"></span>
						</a>
					</div>
					<div class="nav-collapse">
						<ul class="nav menu nav-pills">
<li class="item-101 current active"><a href="/index.php" >Home</a></li></ul>

					</div>
				</nav>

Code (markup):

doing the job of:

<body>

<div id="top">
	<h1><a href="/">Joomla!</a></h1>
	<input type="checkbox" id="menuCheck">
	<label for="menuCheck"></label>
	<ul>
		<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
	</ul>

Code (markup):

... and then people wonder why I call them outdated halfwit garbage where the people coding the back-end don't know enough HTML or CSS to be writing websites.

In any case when the DEMO and examples are chock full of such outright ineptitude, the only way any of these off the shelf solutions can even have clients is preying on the ignorance of said clients, and then confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance preventing people from accepting that they've been taken for a ride. It's like when doomsday cultists have their date for the "end of the world" pass, and they start coming up with BS excuses like "it's through our faith that you were all saved" to justify their ignorant viewpoint and to stay in the cult.

Simple fact is that the most important thing is the CONTENT, which is why you need to START with the content, mark up the content WITHOUT thinking about what it's going to look like, THEN style it for your various media targets in as accessibile a manner as possible. I would point out what I just said is the OPPOSITE of what has become the industry norm, and that's WHY so many "startups" are doomed to failure unless they have that magical mythical "content so damned good" that people will jump through all the annoying hoops to get at it.

Hate them with a passion as it just recreates the exact same garbage as "splash pages" from 15 years ago; something we were REPEATEDLY told by usability experts to STOP DOING! Now that it's not a separate page on a site it's somehow magically ok? BULL!

They are fat, bloated, slow to load, rely entirely on scripting for functionality, and if they take up more than a third of the screen height at 1920x1080 you are basically telling users you don't give a flying **** about them getting to what's ACTUALLY important on a site -- CONTENT!

Which usually means the client knows **** about **** and probably isn't worth the hassle of working for; but as always the -- as a designer I know says with SO much respect -- "Suits with checkbooks" are more easily swayed by "ooh pretty" than they are anything of actual value or substance. This has gotten worse as the artsy fartsy types under the DELUSION that they are "designers" have taken over the industry crapping all over websites with stuff that sure, it's pretty... but it hides content, gets in the way of getting at content, and is more likely to make users bounce looking for some other site with actual content than to put up with the artsy hard to use counterintuitive crap.

Again, see how 99.99% of the fools dicking around in Photoshop and thinking they are "designers" don't know enough about HTML, CSS, emissive colourspace, or accessibility guidelines to be "designing" a blasted thing. They are NOT designers, they're ARTISTS. It's like hiring Bob Ross to design a fighter jet.

There's a concept that is a bit hard to grasp at first, and it involves both the developer and the client understanding it before real progress can be made. Said idea is that you are not building the website for you -- the developer -- NOR are you building the website FOR the client. You are building the website for visitors to the website! The Client's Clients. Just because you might like something, just because the client/site owner goes "ooh shiny" doesn't mean it belongs on a website. Quite the opposite in fact as the "ooh shiny" might be cute once, but it will annoy the user on return visits. (back-read some articles on NNGroup for studies on that).

The most important thing on a website -- not to do a Steve Ballmer impersonation -- is CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT! CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT! CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT! content, content, content, *gasp* *yes*

Clients who know enough to be able to ask for such things generally know JUST enough to be a danger to themselves and their clients, know **** about *** and unless your sole purpose in having them as a cleint is to rape them for all their worth to take the money and run, your job becomes about educating them on how what they are asking for is WRONG. If they aren't willing to listen to that, my advice? RUN!

You'll end up wasting more time dicking around with stupid shit than you will designing and developing sites that are actually useful to users. FAR too many "cleints" and "site owners" aren't qualified to be flapping their gums about ANYTHING involving their sites; that's why they're hiring someone in the first place. If they cannot accept that reality you REALLY don't want them as a client.

Unless you REALLY like headaches, frustration, and spending 20 hours a day cursing under your breath.

SO many of the flash "ain't it neat" garbage that site owners see on other sites (that are usually miserable failures) and want to copy is just going to scare users away. If they don't recognize this you can try pointing them at the major success stories of the Internet, NONE of which have ANY of that crap!

As I often say, you want to see just how full of it your average "designer" is, just ask their opinion of the "design" of Craigslist. Their negative response is simply proof of their ignorance and incompetance.

Amazon, E-Bay, Youtube, Google, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, Slashdot -- NONE of these are what you'd call a visual tour de force; even when they have the type of accessibility failings I'm always railing against like fixed metric fonts and questionabel colour contrasts, they put what's most important -- THEIR CONTENT-- FIRST!!!

Good design should not detract, distract or make it harder / take longer to get at the content. This is a concept the artsy fartsy "designers" and marketing types busting their whiskey fueled nuts in desparation are simply incapable of grasping.

You just don't see this crap on major successful sites, or if you do it usually doesn't last very long. See how paypal shit their own bed two years ago with the FMV on their home page that every month gets smaller, lower resolution, shorter in length as user feedback says "OH for **** sake just let me into my damned account!". See how auto-playing video on FB and YT has gotten a massive negative feedback to the point they had to add user preferences to disable it!

When big sites do try it, it just craps on their traffic from orbit unless their content really is "that damned good" or their primary traffic is nothing but the artsy-fartsy marketing and design types who care about that stuff.

... because *news flash* REAL users -- aka Joe Sixpack and Susie Sunshine -- could give a flying **** about that. It's something Jakob Nielsen said about a decade and a half ago that makes a LOT of sense -- well, unless you're an "artist" -- the best design is one the user doesn't notice.

If the user notices it, they're not seeing the CONTENT. IF the user notices it, it's PROBABLY because it's annoying them or pissing them off. If an image isn't content, if you're just filling out the page with some stupid space-wasting vector logo or stock photograph of some field or happy person that has DICK-ALL to do with your content? DON'T!!!

There's a reason you only see that crap in stock templates, the whorehouses duping people into thinking stock templates are worth anything, and small businesses that someone has strapped a saddle on them to take them for a ride!

Ah yes, the "we'll use you like slave labor for a year and throw you out like a used snot rag" stage. Seen that far too many times. Sadly a lot of these "firms" are so fly-by-night -- run by people unqualified to do anything but use marketspeak doubletalk to dupe the rubes -- that you cannot learn anything of value apart from what's considered "acceptable office behavior"

Sadly said acceptable behavior being "stay in your cubicle, don't question anything, don't make waves, and don't you DARE do anything in a way the rest of us aren't" -- gotta pound every square peg into that round hole.

Then these firms wonder why they end up with a bad reputation and rarely last more than a couple years; or have employee turnover rates that border on unsustainable.

You'll find that if you take the time to study the things I'm talking about -- HTML, the intent of HTML, the purpose of CSS, and accessibility -- you start asking your co-workers and bosses about these things, there are three reactions you'll get:

1) Why are you asking ME? -- in which case they aren't really interested in training you in ****.

2) What's that? -- in which case they aren't qualified to train anyone much less do their job.

3) Ignore that, it limits what we can do artistically. -- in which case they aren't just not qualified to do their job, they've deluded themselves into thinking their bad, sloppy, rubbish practices are acceptable.

 

Actually, I forgot one group...

There's also the big brick and mortar companies ruled by marketing executives, for whom their web presence is mostly an afterthought. See Automotive manufacturers and fast food restaurants for STUNNING examples of artsy fartsy crap that likely has ZERO legitimate traffic.

Then take a look at Domino's website.

https://www.dominos.com/en/index.jsp

Yeah, THAT. While yes, it has massive image "space wasters" those images are of the PRODUCT. They have a clean simple layout designed to drive you towards buying their products. Even with the handful of accessibility faux-pas, what's the first things your eye is drawn to? Big ass pictures of their products, and the "ORDER ONLINE" menu item. THAT is good design, and what little presentational extras are present do not detract from that. It may be knee deep in pointless scripttardery and have some accessibility issues, what's IMPORTANT -- the menu and ordering -- is front, center, and the focus of the site!

Meanwhile you go to McDonalds...
http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/home.html

You have this goofy useless train wreck of pop-up scam bullshit (that anyone with experience in sites spanning more than three years knows is probably making people close the tab before even getting to the site's content), massive space wasting image background image (that doesn't even scale up to fit the screen) where 90% of the used space has nothing to do with their products, illegible color contrasts and thin-glyph webfonts, and on the whole the design is a steaming pile of /FAIL/. HOW you ask can such a major company get away with such a craptastic website built by people who quite clearly have NO business making websites?

Simple, they're a brick and mortar company. They have physical locations and you don't order online from them. A website for them is an expense and afterthought, not a means of driving feet through doors or putting buns in seats. That's why they have a long standing history of some of the WORST in web design we've ever seen! They have one because they are EXPECTED to have one, NOT because they give a flying **** about it.

Same with BK:
http://www.bk.com/

Laundry list train wreck of artsy-fartsy bullshit -- but why should they care? SURE, it's very pretty, but it's bloated slow artsy fartsy bullshit that serves no legitimate purpose apart from "We cans haz a websites?"

I've got small local restaurants nearby with more useful and usable websites than either of those messes; while certainly none of them are as "pretty" as Burger King's, they are far more useful.

The art faygelah BS mostly being thrown on sites like that to cover up for a lack of content of value.

 

Just a word on CMS. I use a CMS, and a framework and themes. BUT.... I have 100% control of how they work because I wrote them to support my personal preferences of how things should be done. I know what every single line of code does, and when there is a problem or I need to do something new I know exactly what method in what class I need to look at. No guessing, no digging through code I have trouble understanding. things get fixed in minutes not days.

The way I do thins is not for everybody. I wrote it for me and it did not happen overnight. I've been programming 50 years and every time I run into a problem I write code to fix it, prevent it in the future, and automate detection. When I need to support new technology;as happened when CSS3 and HTML5 came along, I extend classes to support only what I intend to use; the way I intend to use it.

So I am in favor of CMS, Frameworks, themes, and anything else that makes my job easier by helping me produce easily maintained code. There is nothing off the shelf that does that so when like most professional developers; when something I need does not exist to at the quality level I insist on; I create my own. The biggest advantage to writing your own code is that it forces you to keep learning; to stay current; and to avoid being seduced by glossed wrappers on a load of turds.