Are websites evolving or devolving?

>> Virgil: If you're using the hero to convey a point, you're trying to make a point that really relates to the rest of the page. It has some appropriateness, but a lot of times hero images are just there just to be hero images, you know, just to be like a cool thing.

>> Cole: Well the point needs to be made in that area.

>> Virgil: Hi, everybody, and welcome back to our first episode of 2025.

>> Cole: Wow.

>> Virgil: So we're in the new year.

>> Cole: It's been a year

>> Virgil: still in the hits of winter, so I still have to wear a hoodie and stay warm.

>> Cole: Indeed.

>> Virgil: But, did you have a good holidays Cole?

>> Cole: Yeah, no, I, I did, always love a good holiday season. Good action, that Bob Dylan movie. Really liked it.

>> Virgil: Yeah, I got in some skiing, so that was probably the most important part.

>> Cole: Oh, sweet.

>> Virgil: In that. So, well, today you had something you wanted to talk about that you had mentioned to me briefly. But anyway, why don't you go ahead and bring it up?

>> Cole: Yeah. So, I was talking with a friend the other week and, you know, we were just talking about, for some reason, we were talking about web design. I don't know, we talk about a lot of different stuff. But, he was telling me how he just really hates websites today. And you know, I asked him to elaborate and he pretty much was just talking about how since, like the early days of the Internet, he feels like websites have just gotten way more complicated than they need to be. And I'm like, okay, so

>> Virgil: What?

>> Cole: Like, what's your- I know, crazy concept, right? But he was talking about how his favorite kinds of websites are like just early 2000s government websites. That made me kind of raise my eyebrow a bit that the government. But yeah

>> Virgil: I can understand the early 2000s part, but government? maybe.

>> Virgil: Yeah, yeah, okay.

>> Cole: No, that's, it's certainly kind of questionable take there, but I just thought there was definitely some validity in what he's saying though, with how websites have gotten from a UX perspective, just more complicated as time's gone on, and I wanted to hear your perspective on it because I know you've, you know, worked with websites in several different angles for like, you know, almost 30 years now. More, I don't know. But still, I thought it would be good to, bring this conversation over to you and, yeah, that's kind of what I wanted to talk about here today.

>> Virgil: So are they more complicated? My answer is yes.

>> Cole: Yes, they are.

>> Virgil: Is that good now?

>> Cole: So. Yeah, episode done.

>> Virgil: No, I'm just kidding. Just kidding. yeah, I mean, it. I mean, there, there's so many different ways you could go with that. You, know. But the reality is is the web has went through so many different iterations throughout the years. And you know, it's to me the funniest thing is I really... what happens on the web, I actually, if I was to say the thing that I think of as the closest proximity to it, it's fashion, fashion because every year there's a new trend, there's a new something. It's the way you're using fonts and text or it's the way you're using images. Like I remember when hero images became the big thing and everything had to have a hero image in it and then the call to action boxes and everything else like that. I mean there's so many different things. But I also remember back when, you know, in the early 2000s when Flash was a really big plugin, and I don't know if you know what Flash is, but Flash was like an animation type thing, and I always remember that, you know I, I was building these very straightforward websites out of HTML and CSS and you know, and then you'd have, there, there was like a company out in... I don't remember what the name of it was, but anyway it was out on the west coast and you could give them like $300,000 and a five page template and it'd be like a button that would spin and like that and things like that, and that was the big trend and everybody found out that sucked and so they got rid of it. And so we kind of went back to simple in there and stayed there for a while. And then things started to get more complex where you started talking about things like parallax scrolling and that kind of stuff where you know, where you're scrolling down a page and it doesn't feel like, it feels like the content is stationary and the page itself is moving. Apple likes to use that a lot in their kind of stuff. And, and so the reason I bring that up is because there's really this, this conflict of interest that happens out there, and it's a conflict of interest that is not new. It's, it's happened forever. And that is marketing wanting to do new and cool and, and always show off and stay with trends and everything like that. And there's a certain amount of need in the public to be able to see things that look modern, that look stylish, that kind of do things that other sites do. and then there's the other side which is user experience where you have sites that people actually need to complete things. And the reason I call these conflicts is because a lot of times, we do so much on this side and make this side suffer a lot. And very rarely do you see somebody that did lots of UX and, and made the marketing side suffer. And we see it all the time with, with you know, projects that we've seen out there in the world where there's just a lot of nonsensical animations that happen. You know, things needing to change, color, things needed to do things, and it's all for the effort of presentation, which I, I'm not saying presentation is not important, but, you know, ever since I started High Monkey a really long time ago, my number one thing was, you know, form should support function, not function support form. And so therefore if you have those things, how does that enhance the user experience? Because if you're doing it just to make something flashy and cool, there's maybe appropriate spots for it, but overall we tend to go way too far with those things and they tend to cause a lot of problems. So, with that, I agree with your friend. I think, you know, some of the best websites I built throughout my entire career have been ones that have been very simple and straightforward and had very good, you know, architecture and didn't, have a lot of, you know, kind of fanciness to it.

>> Cole: Yep. Can you kind of like pinpoint... I mean, I know it's probably like a gradual shift, but can you pinpoint kind of a, like a year or like, like an era when this shift towards like, more stylistic centeredness, over functionality kind of occurred? Because it feels like, I mean, there wasn't a ton of opportunity for like, the stylistic part of websites to be the main, piece early on in the, in the web because, you know, we were just focused more on like the...

>> Virgil: Yeah, I mean, I mean, honestly, in the early 2000s when Flash became very popular, that that whole stylistic component became very popular. And then when Flash kind of went out of, fashion, you know, we kind of went back to basic because, the things that we could do with HTML and CSS were really just not there to be able to do that. it really came around when HTML5 was released and later versions of CSS and we started to be able to do more animations, more kind of design elements and that kind of stuff, from that side. And you know, a lot of people that work, in the web and a lot of organizations also work on the print side and print obviously is very much known for kind of very splashy, you know, type of things in there. so I think probably if you were really to say when we really started to move to more stylistic, you're probably talking the late 2000s, you know, maybe early 2010s and that. but definitely when we hit the pandemic in 2020, a lot of companies went and, and they kind of, they really beefed up their online presence and part of that was making it a lot less probably practical and a lot more flashy. So you see a lot more websites out there now that have a lot more style to them that don't necessarily support the function of the, the sites and the pages.

>> Cole: Yeah, I feel like, you know, organizations, companies, whatnot probably feel some pressure these days to keep up with you know, these trends and to have a website that will stand out in the, in the just absolute, you know, abyss of all these websites out there with crazy designs with you know, just, I mean just looking at like navigations now. I mean I get so confused when I'm just trying to browse regular...

>> Virgil: You know the funny thing is is, and, throughout my entire history of, of doing this, you know, the, the one thing is, and I think a big influence right now is kind of the social media and everything that happens with that. And there's so much, you know, and what we can do with artificial intelligence and kind of generating these really cool videos and that kind of stuff just off you know, a two word sentence. Yeah. You know, and that kind of stuff. There, there's a lot of things driving this way we see our online presence. But what we forget is that people are there on our site to do something. Whether it's learn about our product, whether it's, you know, purchase something, whether it is to understand a service, do research around a particular topic. You know, there's a lot of different reasons that people visit it, but that is the purpose there their purpose is not to see how cool you can build pages, it's a look at it. Now, if your website looked like a website from the early 2000s, there is a little bit of an argument there about credibility because you know, I think people have become a little bit more skeptical about websites. And if websites don't look like they're kind of staying up to date, people kind of look at that company as older and stale and not really doing it, there's definitely an argument there. But at the same time you can do that and make it look much cooler, but at the same time you can actually follow the practical thing of getting them to their experience. And I think that's what a lot of organizations lose is they kind of really focus on the flashy and don't focus on the practical side of it.

>> Cole: So are you kind of saying that there needs to be a best of both worlds when it comes to, you know, keeping some of the principles from, you know, the early 2000s, even late 90s of you know, some functionality, oriented design, keeping the actual purpose of the site in mind but also keeping it like modern and not having it look like an ancient website and keeping that credibility.

>> Virgil: 100%. I'll give you a great example. One of the, one of the most kind of overused functions on sites now today is, is the number counter. and whether it's, you know, you're scrolling down and you see these numbers counting up or, or you see something, you know, a circle filling in whatever it is like that. It's, it's this visual impact that people have, you know, and a lot of that was started with like colleges. You know, they did that to say like, here's our enrollment numbers, here's the money we save you, here's the number of people that jobs, you know, jobs people get and that kind of stuff. And there's, there's an actual value to that and there's some psychology behind, you know, the whole number counting thing that you all sense it. Oh, that didn't come up to a really large number or that did come up to a really large number or look at how fast that got completed. It just is something subliminal inside there. But at the same time, what's happened now is it's overused. Everybody uses it for 550,000 things, you know, just because like, well, I want to show you three settings. So I'm going to have that do that just to be able to make those settings look cool. And it just doesn't do it. So there's a practical application for all this. but there has to be it. It's the same as like a hero image. People use hero images for everything, even when hero images are not necessary. You know, a lot of times when people are getting to subpages on a site, they want to get to the content and find their information. They don't want to see yet another big graphic sitting in front of them that's supposed to be something to them but is really meaningless.

>> Cole: Yeah, honestly, sometimes it feels like websites are like all hero. Like the entire page is like a hero image. And I'm like, yeah, well, you know.

>> Virgil: We're still going through the redesign of our site, and you and I have had many discussions about that where that, you know, if you're using the hero to convey a point, you're trying to make a point that really relates to the rest of the page. It has some appropriateness, but a lot of times hero images are just there just to be hero images, you know, just to be, like, a cool thing.

>> Cole: But the point needs to be made in that area, otherwise people don't really know why they're on your website, so.

>> Virgil: Correct. Yeah.

>> Cole: Kind of a core theme here of, you know, you need to keep in mind, like, the purpose of the page of the website and keep that in mind during the design

>> Virgil: Yep, exactly. So. But what a great and timely topic, because I agree. I think I'm starting to see, even from customers, out there, people kind of starting to transition a little bit back to simpler, in their designs.

>> Cole: I approve. I approve of this, this wave of simplicity going into websites.

>> Virgil: Yeah, well, that's a good topic for the start of 2025. It'll be fun to see what this year brings, so.

>> Cole: Right on. we got a lot of good content coming, so stay tuned.

>> Virgil: Yep. Thanks, everybody, for joining.

>> Virgil: Just a reminder, we'll be dropping new episodes every two weeks. If you enjoyed the discussion today, we would appreciate it if you hit the like button and leave us a review or comment below. And to listen to past episodes or be notified when future episodes are released, visit our website at www.discussingstupid.com and sign up for our email updates. Not only will we share when each new episode drops, but also we'll be including a ton of good content to help you in Discussing Stupid in your own organization. Of course, you can also follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or SoundCloud, or really any of the other favorite podcast platforms you might use. Thanks again for joining and we'll see you next time.