Note this guideline as well: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." You've been breaking that one badly too.
That argument might hold some water if you hadn't been blatantly abusing the submission system and violating the site guidelines.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html: "If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok." Emphasis added.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
For the delete and repost, I did not read that guideline so I apologise for that.
However, the discussion itself is something new to Hacker News - is there a way to have it back up please? 99% of the comments are about this form of web design vs professionalism
That argument might hold water if you hadn't been using HN exclusively to promote your own stuff. That's not what HN is supposed to be for, as the guidelines make clear.
If you care about interesting discussions, the way to show that is to contribute stories that are just interesting without having any promotional angle. If you do that, then it's great to share your own stuff occasionally as part of the mix. That's the way to be a good community contributor.
I don't mean to be mean, but it feels pretty important to reiterate the values of the site.
It doesn't seem fair to enforce it on this post in particular.
The discussion is primarily focused on unprofessionalism in design.
Why can you not put this post back up? I understand the other posts being argued as purely self promotion, but this is a completely new discussion where the majority of the talking points are outside the product
You only made the front page with this post because you abused the deletion system badly, along with using a baity title. I was willing to let the latter pass when I first saw it, because it was also fun, but when I saw that you'd posted your site and then deleted it over 30 times—that's outrageous. The community expects us not to allow such manipulation.
Lots of people make fun websites and post them here without resorting to such tricks. I don't think it would be fair to those users to let you get away with breaking the rules this badly.
I don't think this is so hard to understand? You're totally welcome in this community if you want to be a good community member along with everyone else. Above all, that means using it for curiosity, not just as a promotional channel.
That assaults you with a mix of garish colors and animations, but sections of sanity break through now and there.
The site for Yvette's Bridal Formal, sadly now gone but archived [1], lacks the animations, but doubles down on the color assault and doesn't interrupt it with any sanity for arguably more effective inflection of mental damage upon the viewer.
Mental illness in word usage and web design. Some of the words in there remind me of if a Terry A. Davis was untalented, and did web design instead of write compilers, langs, and OS'.
The copywriting is very fresh and to the point:
“ You can take the Hyundai Tucson abroad to any normal destination (usually excluding dodgy places like Albania, etc), but you should apply for a VE103 form from the finance company before you go, which proves to the damn foreign police that you have permission to use the car.”
> Note to Americans: the £ is like the $, except bigger
This is just perfect. I love this website so much. If I lived in the UK I would seriously consider buying from this website. So I guess this advertising works for me.
I'm kind of sad they minified their CSS and some of their JS. Sure minification saves some bytes, but I really wonder how much we really save assuming the server uses compression. I love being able to see how different sites work and minification makes that a lot harder.
Part of what makes this fun is that Canlis is a high end dining restaurant and generally uses a very modern/professional aesthetic in their branding: https://canlis.com/
There's something very appealing to me about people who name their companies after themselves. Ling's cars, Prusa Research, Linus Media Group. Maybe I'm only remembering the good examples, but when you put yourself out there, it seems like there is a strong incentive to not fuck up your reputation.
The 19th century feel it lends may also be a part of it, and is also not accidental: the naming scheme originates from the times before the modern corporation, where no isolation from liability meant a failed business could easily leave the founder on the street (but loans were also much less accessible). Not much to lose further, then, is there?
> There's something very appealing to me about people who name their companies after themselves. Ling's cars, Prusa Research, Linus Media Group. Maybe I'm only remembering the good examples, but when you put yourself out there, it seems like there is a strong incentive to not fuck up your reputation.
So it would seem, but companies can and do survive their founders, and at that point they are no different than any other. Not to mention that founders can be motivated by reputation in an idiosyncratic manner.
One I found that's similar is http://9front.org/. I scratched my head in disbelief because I was looking for an operating system, and the website looked like I arrived at a kooky conteo place.
It also renders fine (and quickly) with no Javascript. I'm going to guess it's probably also friendly on the data. It's (mostly) legible, despite the color scheme. There's no autoplaying video or audio that assaults my senses.
I think we could use more design like this on the web, but, you know, with interesting stuff to read.
> "The punk ethos is primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, a do-it-yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action and not "selling out"."
That punk is treated as a serious artistic subject does not conflict with that. There's lots of other unprofessional subjects and motifs in art spaces, e.g., nudity.
"Unprofessional" only makes sense in the context of some particular profession. Many English dictionary definitions even explicitly mention something like "the expectations of a particular profession." I'm pretty sure there still are professional standards for doing graphic design work for a punk art organization. And you wouldn’t say that a plumber is coveralls is dressing unprofessionally. The word “unprofessional” doesn’t just mean “anything that’s different than a stock photo of a banker.”
In this case, the context is software development, and we are discussing advertising/marketing/landing material on the sales website. The OP website dramatically departs from the expectations of this profession. The OP is not selling art.
Did I state it was bad? or did I imply it was poorly made? I think it is a very well thought out, and well implemented website. Professionality and quality used in same context is mutually exclusive.
You've misunderstood me. I'm saying your previous comment implied that someone else must think the website is poorly made when they call it unprofessional.
> "The punk ethos is primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, a do-it-yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action and not "selling out"."
Substitute "Punk" for e.g. "Group" and read that sentence again.
Quite a few examples of this aesthetic can be found on Brutalist Websites[0]. (Be forewarned, the Brutalist Websites site itself is brutal in a different way: it tries to load hundreds of high-res screenshots all at once.)
Some time ago this was showcased on hn too: https://build.mmm.page/
It too is a dnd website builder that prone fun and brutalist design and whole tld also is .page. Are these two projects related ?
straw.page has been posted by okozzie 16 times in the last 10 months, sometimes the odd URL hack to get past the repost filters (+?, /start, +?ref=hn, +?ref, +?utm) but mostly just the same page.
What makes it professional is that it's designed, with the intent to look oldschool/unprofessional. You've likely used a process and tools you were already familiar with.
Vernacular/unprofessional web design is search engine driven these days – using what's in reach. Basically searching for "create a website" and using one of the guides and tools popping up in the search results.
I'm really disappointed that there's no midi of the X-Files theme playing the background.
For everything I built that never leaves my home network, I always use the HTML `marquee` tag somewhere, simply because I think it's funny and it's bizarrely still supported.
I love this! A large appeal of this kind of thing is unlocking possibilities outside of the Generic Website box, so making that dead obvious to people is a very straightforward demonstration of value.
"hipsterDB is a key/value store that only returns data as long as it isn't mainstream. The more often that you access a key the more mainstream it becomes. After data has gone mainstream you will have to wait for it to go out of style before using it again."
"Straw.Page lets you create unique websites straight from your phone.
A drag and drop website builder that works on mobile."
It clearly tells me what the product does unlike many landing pages these days. I often have to read docs to understand what a product does because someone decided to put too much effort to make it look unique.
Okay, so, like. For the record. BUILDING and CLOUD are genius. I'm not even upset at what you've done with that. I wish more sites took themselves so blatantly as this one.
Just to be clear, those aren't stats for my site (or any site) haha.
Premium users get analytics on their website - that was just supposed to highlight the analytics feature. I'll try to make it more clear that they aren't real stats (it's a demonstration of the feature)
I wish the whole internet looked like this again, along with very little or no Javascript. Thanks for the best looking site I've seen today, aside from Ling's cars[0], which is also awesome.
I remember building sites like this using my feature phone way back when I was a kid, likely around 2006-2008. At the time I didn't have any other options to access the internet, so I used what I have. Used all of my allowance to buy some credits for a prepaid cell plan and spent most of my time on WAP site builders.
How unprofessional is it? Can you guarantee that i will lose customers if i use it? How many will i lose? How am i supposed to trust this service, it's so doesnt look very professional
I really love this! Any plans to make it a bit easier to use on desktop? I'd love to build my personal website on this, just like GeoCities back in the day.
on a serious note, imo knowing exactly how to subvert a design or pattern shows not just mastery of the topic, but also flexiblity and when _not_ to use the thing
They should be more toward the middle of the page so they look down more often. Maybe are there because of 'follow on Twitter' and that was best on the bottom of the page.
Beyond that, you have posted it dozens of additional times and then deleted it. That's abusive. It's also against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Note this guideline as well: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." You've been breaking that one badly too.