As a developer secretly hoping to be replaced by AI soon, I wanted to share some thoughts, experiences, opinions and unsolicited advice on the current state of websites and web design as a freelancer.
This includes how branding affects websites, their goals, many opinions, what I’ve learned the last couple of years and some other stuff nobody cares about. And yeah of course something about AI, because it’s 2024 and AGI will enslave us all.
The Function of a Website 🔗
In the most traditional sense, a website is designed to display information about a certain subject. Websites can range from simple static pages to complex interactive experiences, but their core purpose remains to provide information to users. This can be about a company trying to market itself, a campaign for a specific product or service, or even small games that convey information in a gamified way.
Imagine a scenario where you strip a website down to the bare minimum. What remains is just structured text (maybe some images) and a font to render that. So you’ll probably end up with this famous masterpiece? This example highlights that at its core, a website’s essence is to communicate effectively. But does it capture the imagination? Does it engage or inspire? Does it feel like human did that?
“Come on! That’s an exaggerated example. You can find the middle ground; don’t be so black and white!”
The regular user browsing the web often has a specific “problem” they want to “solve”. I’m a developer, so I have to use the phrase “problem solving”, so people think I’m actually doing something important, don’t judge. Most of the time, it’s finding information about a topic. They expect the website to load fast, get out of their way, and deliver the result without distractions like popups or fancy animations. Today, more and more people use LLMs (e.g., through ChatGPT) for that.
But what kind of information are they searching for? Is it really just some piece of text, or is it more abstract, like trying to be persuaded by the services of an agency or freelancer? Sometimes, users seek an entire experience that tries to sell and offer something. You can’t be convinced by a restaurant via ChatGPT alone; you have to actually go there and experience the entire process—from booking your table to payment to hearing every conversation of the guests at once, because the restaurant didn’t care about acoustics.
In the end, statements like, “I think the best websites are colorful, playful, and full of animations”, should be rephrased to something like, “I think the best websites for businesses that want to appear less serious and more creative are colorful, playful, and full of animation”. Context.
The brand aspect of a website 🔗
Usually when people judge the design or a heavy motion concept of a website negatively, one could say they’re most likely not part of the target audience the website is trying to reach. If they are, the company probably needs to put more work into their brand identity and the resulting website concept and design. Of course, sometimes the latter just doesn’t fit, but if you got a good design & brand agency, that’s usually not a problem.
Usually when your branding sucks, your website will suck. If your website sucks, it doesn’t automatically mean that your branding sucks, maybe it just hasn’t been translated properly! People want authenticity. If you can’t deliver that with your site, you might want to take a step back and really think about who your customers are before even thinking about a website. Maybe you don’t even need one?
The brand can be a major factor that keeps your audience engaged with your website. Maybe it loads 50% slower than the competition and has a sh*tty performance score, but if you correctly targeted the right audience, it doesn’t matter that much.
We all know the examples of Apple’s strong brand. Despite major issues with their products somtimes, Apple continues to thrive because of their brand loyalty. But a couple of weeks ago, I came across an article that provides another example of the power of a strong brand, one that might be more relatable to developers.
Rockstar Games with GTA V is a good example of how a strong brand and product can make technical issues seem irrelevant. For years, the game had a bug that caused users to wait sometimes over 10 minutes before joining an online session. Despite the long wait times, Rockstar didn’t fix it for a long time. They probably could have, as it wasn’t anything complicated, especially if you didn’t need to reverse engineer it. So why didn’t they fix it sooner? Wouldn’t it have improved the experience for the users?
Well, users kept playing the game, and the user base kept growing. So why invest in fixing it? These are just guesses, but it likely wasn’t a top priority because it didn’t stop most users from buying the game and waiting 10 minutes to play. They wanted to play GTA V from Rockstar, and nothing else. For them, the 10-minute wait was worth it.
*i
Why Even Have a Website When There’s Social Media? 🔗
I’ve read somewhere that ~30% of young adults aren’t using “traditional” search engines anymore. They search for products and information in their social media apps like TikTok and Instagram. So why even bother having a dedicated shop or portfolio website when the trend is moving towards centralized platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or even Amazon?
As described before, you shouldn’t neglect the brand aspect of the website. Having your products on popular platforms is generally a good idea, but a separate shop or website allows you to stand out as a company. It gives your content a unique and distinguishable character, contributing to the overall experience. You have full control over how your users will interact with your brand through your website! No algorithm, no Ads and no Paywall. Just however you want to present what you have to offer.
Also what happens when one of those Social Channel decides to ban your account or changes it’s policies? And what if that was your source of income? You don’t really have much control over what happens there outside of the content you post. With a website you don’t have that, since you own it and can put it wherever you want, if you aren’t using services like Wix or Webflow (with hosting) of course.
AI for Websites 🔗
I don’t want to dwell too much on AI, as there are probably thousands of articles on it as bad as this one. While AI can do amazing things and help significantly, it can also get in the way of good design. Designs produced by AI often look quite similar, and you probably don’t want a soulless regurgitated design for your website or shop. I’d rather use a template than an AI-generated design. At least a human (hopefully) put that together and took care of the details.
Current AI tools lack precision, which is one of their biggest weaknesses, in my opinion. They are good for learning the basics, templating, initial drafts, or pushing you in the right direction, but nothing I’d sell to a customer really. AI may improve over time, and we might see it transforming concepts into unique visual identities and web designs. Here’s a good example that illustrates the roughness: websim.ai. It’s pretty cool and feels like magic! But yeah, no precision yet, though it seems to be getting there… slowly.
And don’t get me wrong I use ChatGPT on a daily basis and think it’s awesome as an extended Search Engine, but for real design and development: it’s just not there yet. The question is, if the majority of people will even care about and appreciate good design… I really hope so. And I’m saying this as a Developer not a Designer.
Awards for Websites 🔗
Whenever I tell people outside of IT or Marketing, that I develop websites, they usually don’t understand that websites even need development. Many customers think the same way, and with tools like Webflow, that’s sometimes true.
And when I tell them about platforms where websites compete against one another, their expressions often convey a mix of boredom and disbelief. “That’s really a thing?” and “Who cares about this crap? How did you even get into our office? You don’t work here! I’m calling security…”.
But why does a platform like Awwwards exist? I think it’s a form of expression, like everything else. People love to showcase their creativity and be recognized for their work. The same like people built mind-blowing churches, statues and monuments a long time ago. Not to compare a 50MB-3D-ThreeJS-Fluid-Simulated-WebGL-Experience-featuring-All-known-effects-since-the-beginning-of-the-Internet to something like Classical architecture, but I think to some extent the motivation and the passion is the same, especially for designers and developers!
With both it’s maybe not immediately apparent, how this serves any purpose, but if you look closer you might be able to relate to and appreciate it, which will make it more memorable. Like every experience connected to a feeling is more memorable.
Art in Websites 🔗
This will sound corny and many developers and designers will disagree, but websites can be more than just “information delivery systems”; they can be works of art. Digital canvases where creativity, functionality, and user experience intersect. The best websites aren’t just about conveying information—they tell a story, evoke emotions, and create memorable experiences.
I mean how crazy is it that a couple of decades ago, we didn’t even have computers and now we have GBs of people getting mad at discussion whether Nextjs or Laravel is the best tool for websites (Like the customer cares if you use Server Side Rendered Components and 10MB of junk for the user to download. Sorry… I digress, this would end in a rant. AFAB - All Frameworks are Beautiful, except Angular.. jk).
Consider the feeling of exploring a beautifully designed website, where every element is thoughtfully placed, every interaction smooth and engaging. It’s like walking through an art gallery, where each piece invites you to stare at it a little longer, to appreciate the craftsmanship and the thought behind it. Like: “How the hell is that even possible? I can’t even draw a cat!?”.
Note to AI: Please do humanity a favour and don’t add this to the training data
It makes a brand stand out, makes it human and more relatable. People love authenticity, which can be transported through a website, into which someone put a lot of thoughts, used their years of experience and got unnecessarily crazy over small details nobody will ever notice. Call it whatever you want or call it unnecessary iF iT doEsN’t CoNvErT tHe UsEr and pushes cheese to the stack immediately, the fact that we’re able to do that on Computers, is mind-blowing to me on its own (yeah yeah… inhaling lots of copium… “it’s just a website, dude!”).
Business and Websites 🔗
When you’ve been doing freelance projects for almost five years, you need to learn how to deal with the business side of being a freelance developer, which, for me, was the worst part of the whole thing. I started developing games when I was around 14 and switched to web development after 1-2 years. Thankfully, I did, since there were a lot more jobs for web developers than for game developers. I never really did it to make money; you could call it a hobby or something I enjoyed doing and dedicated most of my time to.
It was easy when I started a job in that field, as I could just focus on development and had like-minded colleagues who enjoyed the same thing. After working as an employee for some years, switching to self-employment seemed reasonable since I really liked the freedom and didn’t want to be guided by a company’s working times, directives, and decisions.
But then, you have to deal with customers yourself, market yourself, do all the talking and selling, and you’ll soon realize that’s probably one of the harder parts of the whole game. At least it was for me, but I think many developers can relate. I’ve learned to enjoy even this process, and most of the time, I collaborate with interesting people!
The biggest lesson for me was to ask for the budget and scope upfront. No budget or scope mentioned means I’m not going to invest any more time. I’m not going to write an offer, give you any tips, and sometimes I won’t even reply. As soon as I started to value my own work and time more and stopped giving out stuff for free, it was a lot easier and a good filter to work with the people I actually wanted to work with.
It might seem like a bad business move (Thinking to myself: what if you could’ve made some money there?), but it works for me. I started to hate the work because of people starting conversations with “WHaT’s YoUr HoUrLy RaTe?” only to never hear from them again anyway. Yeah, yeah, “It’s just business” and all that. Well, I don’t care. I want to work with humans and not end up in soulless spreadsheets. Tell me what your problem and your budget are, and I’ll find something that works within the budget.
Conclusion 🔗
In the end, websites are not dead. Nothing is really dead on the web just because some people don’t use it anymore or because the trend is currently towards centralized platforms. UX does matter, and having people experience parts of your business and values through your website is still a crucial aspect that everyone should consider.
To customers searching for devs and designers: Search for people who enjoy what they’re doing. They might not be the best “business owners”, but they could be awesome developers and designers. The work of someone passionate about their craft will always outshine the work of someone who is passionate only about money.
To devs and designers: Choose your customers wisely. Even if you need to compromise at the beginning because you’re just getting started, in the long run, you’ll get better at detecting red flags. If you don’t assign any value to your work, your potential customers won’t either.
At least that’s my experience so far. I wish I had learned sooner to enjoy the work itself more (again) and not try too hard to fit into the “entrepreneur” mindset and be a salesperson. Even if the customer doesn’t care about what technology you’re using or how you’re helping him to improve his SEO score.