Why does this site look like it came from 1995?
Several reasons:
- Download times rule the Web. Users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds. The simplest way to achieve this is avoid heavy use of graphics and animation.
- I am a software designer, not a visual designer, so my graphics would look crummy anyway. Since this website is created by myself (and not by a multidisciplinary team that includes graphic designers) I need to stay within my area of expertise.
- Hiring a web designer to make a cosmetically attractive web site would cost money, which would require I place advertising on the page, and I bet you're happy to not see any ads, aren't you?
- I have to maintain the site myself and a simple text-only web site can be maintained with free easy-to-learn tools such as Mozilla Composer or the great blogging platform on which this was created, BearBlog.
- In the opinion of many usability experts, most fancy animations and graphics found on the web do not increase comprehension or usability. Some of the most popular sites on the Web -- DuckDuckGo, Craigslist, Wikipedia, to name a few -- are often very heavy on the text and very light on the imagery.
For more info about the need for sub-second response times, see the short essay on the three main response time limits or the book Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond.
If you aren't offended by extremely harsh profanity, you might read this crude, crass, vituperative underscore to the above points. (Not written by this blogger.)