Only Noobs Build Beautiful Websites

The right and practical way of building a profitable website.

[monnocatto]

IMO the amazon website is not a good example of UX focused design, it's way too cluttered with messy information and it's often unclear where you will find the info you're actually looking for. Using only access counts as a metric of how good the website is can also be quite misleading, as the market presence of the brand behind the website will have a much bigger influence than the design of the website itself (as long as it is decently functional of course).

Also I think your argument on "content is king" is kinda mixing the responsibilities a little bit. "Displaying" content in a clear, useful and user-friendly manner is the designer's responsibility, "having" content is not, it depends on what the company has to offer. Just take the craigslist example, sure it may get a lot of daily accesses, while being very ugly, but that is because the "service" behind the website is popular and widely used, it doesn't mean that the website is the best it could be. A company's website can play a large role on establishing the brand image, an ugly website will not help with that, in fact it might even make the company seem sketchy. Overall I do agree with your argument that user experience is much more important than anything else in a website, but I wouldn't say that looking good does not matter at all. For example, craigslist does have pages for the region I live, but there's barely anything in them. Why? Because here we have other similar services, with better advertising, better branding and better looking websites, which don't lose at all in functionality. It's all a game of knowing what to focus on where. UX will always be first, but don't neglect UI entirely.

Also friendly edit just to say these are all simple suggestions, don't mean to sound like an angry criticist '^^

[unadventurer_]

I've been a designer for many years. Worked as freelance and in agencies, and this video touches on so many incredibly important points and straight up facts that newer designers should understand sooner than later.

Function over form.

Really really great video, dude.

[blockshift]

>Finds the ugliest website ever
>Find out the entirety of internet will disappear if the website disappear.

[JeyasuriyaA-bu]

Bro, the websites you showcased are functional websites where people visit it to use, and they are just flat designs and the design decisions are made for that purpose only. The award winning websites are built to showcase their works, or about a brand(their focus is to impress users why to chose their brand), or explain a story or information in a visually stunning manner, or creating more inspirational ideas, passion projects that can make way for the future Web 4.0. I am too not a professional developer, but I am an UX designer and I know where to make what kind of designs. So both Flat designs and More flashy designs have different purposes and they have to be used only for those scenarios only and please don't mock award winning website designers or developers for that.

[Captain.Mystic]

Id be fine with beautiful or functional websites if they used more colors than white, black, "like this" red, "do this" blue, "buy now" green, and whatever their increasingly corporatized logos color is as their ENTIRE color pallette.

[Madiane]

damn i watched that whole video in full screen and assumed the whole time that it was a at least 30k subscribers design youtuber and i scroll down only to see "996 view", damn ! you are amazing

[awabqureshi]

You really compiled all the things I learnt on my first front-end job into one video. This is great for new devs!

[niwashlarc]

This video gives out the wrong message. The point you're trying to make is that "UI" shots in Dribbble designs look cool but functionally impractical. But what ends up conveying here is that good looking designs are a sin. And the examples you've shown here are websites that have existed for years if not decades. And these websites like Indian Railways are actually used cuz there is no other alternative. If I want to book a ticket to travel in a train, I must use indian railways even if its shit. These sites are used for so many years that even a minor design revamp can cause huge uproar cuz users are so used to that style of design for years and they are not ready to learn a new usage pattern. But showing these as examples and creating a new product with those same old ugly UI will cause more problems for the business. No user would be ready to use a new product that looks like its straight out of 90s with no CSS.

[goksshn]

this will be medical for some frontend developers without designing skills, like me

[denisdeseneaza]

1:35 why is the hub higher than Twitter 😭

[Its-InderjeetSinghGill]

Bro you opened my eyes, even though I am not a frontend dev but when I see those dribble designs, I started thinking that way which is completely wrong and impractical.

[magnusm]

It's funny how modern and professional design platforms are characterized by simple shapes and single basic colors.
Windows XP had the shaded curved logo design and lower activity board.
Today it's a single color with a simple 2D shape and no drawn shader or anything.
Everything has become flat. Somehow that's professional and the modern trend of design for everyone to follow.

[ToluDare.]

no, I HATE THE AMAZON WEBSITE!!! idk if im the first to say it but it sucks. Its too wordy and feels like im still in the 2000s. I find it complicated and just disappointing but yh i get what you mean in functionality but still....

[adams]

I love that a lot of comments are missing the point. Probably the complains are coming from web designers.

It seems like these designers think when they are designing websites they make an art project, while in the reality it's just a way of delivering what works on customer's favor. Simplicity is still a way to go.

[t.t.o.p]

the best video I've seen in my life about design, and "design is not art" was like a punch in the stomach

[nustaniel]

YouTube is a beautiful website. It's well laid out. It has nice little animations. Google has a beautiful simple website. The search bar looks nice and inviting. It's polished. Netflix is a beautiful website. As is HBO's Max website. You can make a beautiful website that is still functional. Simplistic design is also beautiful. But.. these are also established sites to be fair. They weren't that beautiful once upon a time. Look at how YouTube once looked.

And there's obvious contrarian websites to your claim that functionality is all that matters. Amazon has an awful user experience design, it is cluttered and cumbersome to navigate, but they're a massive company because it has been around since the times when the web was overall a much more ugly and cluttered place, since users are used to it, don't go around changing what isn't broken — that'll only upset your massive user base (like every YouTube redesign ever). I also think Facebook is pretty ugly, but it too has been around for so long that it doesn't matter. The users are already on the service, and since everyone else is, that's where your parents are going to go and sign up too, and not some new startup that looks nicer, even if they were a superior service in terms of user privacy and features. Think about it; How do you dethrone a website with 3 billion users? The top sites are at the top because they've been around for so long that it no longer matters if they are easy to navigate or on the eye. They already have the users. This applies to Craigslist too btw. It went up in 1995 if I recall right. A year before a very basic first implementation of CSS was there to style elements with.

I do think functionality is the main thing to strive for and what should be the main focus of your design. Absolutely, that is very well said in the video. Is your site easy to navigate. Is it simple enough to not be distracting? Is your eyes drawn to the right locations without needing to seek to find what you are after? How much of an impact does beautifying it have on the user's time spent moving around the site. A ton of animations is only going to become annoying if you want to get from A to B on a site to do something, especially when they are longer than at most 0.3s.

Still, we can have beautiful design as well as functionality. And to say you can't make a responsive beautiful website that looks good not only on your PC but also on your smartphone is a bit silly. That's perfectly doable. It's absolutely not impossible nor that overly complicated if you keep it in mind during your design phase. And you can absolutely optimize a beautiful website to not take long to load. What are you even on about. A bad developer might not optimize, but a good one will. How long does Netflix take to load for you? How about YouTube? Think about all the graphics these sites are serving you at any given time. Icons, thumbnails, user profile images, video, etc. These sites are relatively well optimized to load on your devices quickly.
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Btw. recommending fonts without even mentioning that you either will have to embed them by serving them from your domain or rely on third-party sites like Google to push them into your page is a bit of an oversight. You can't expect the users to have those fonts installed on their system. If you want to be safe and not deal with embedding or importing a font from a third-party service, "Arial, sans-serif" is one of the safer combinations.

Your color section is also fundamentally missing the point of using color to draw attention to certain things. Look at what Netflix is coloring in their brand red. Sign In. Get Started. Your Plan Trip button isn't standing out. It's lost in the rest of the design. It all looks washed out and there's nothing that makes my eyes lock in on important elements that you want the user to engage with. You'll want to make sure calls to action, such as Plan Trip is immediately standing out.

[jawad_youtube]

As a new dev I was struggling with my web design skills. This video gave me the confidence that I don't need to design something too fancy, I just need to design simple, user-friendly, functional websites.

[tegathemenace]

Great point. But these are mostly established brands that people would go through hoops to patronize.

Being visually daring as a startup isn't that bad a wager

[karthiksandiri]

hello @Sajid You just drew a solid THICK LINE between content-visual websites and more functional websites, this video is very beneficial for those who are stepping in as new developers and designers, most of the beginners and mid-level developers and designers are getting confused because of these thin lines between 2 category websites, now you clear very extraordinary way. thanks, mate. ☕🍻

[outlawsyl]

To be fair there are a LOT of websites that are ugly and non functional, more than there are websites that are beautiful and non functional. I wouldn't define "ugly" as "minimalistic" though, usually those websites have weird artistic details that are just non untuitive, like big jpg images used as main buttons to sub-pages. I think optimization is the most important for good traffic, and that includes accessibility, things like translation, readable colors even to colorblind people, maybe even blind/deaf accessiblity