What Makes a Good Website?
24 Feb 2022Adobe Flash.
Adobe ended its development of flash at the end of 2020, resulting in the discontinuation of browser support for all Flash plug-ins. In my early days of browsing the internet circa 2003, I’d spend most of my computer time playing online flash games or watching Flash animations of stick-figures and creepy cartoons. Occasionally I’d visit the website of a band I liked or of a random project someone shared and the entire page would be created with Flash. This allowed for a fully interactive web experience in which the whole page might react to the movements of your cursor or the input of your keyboard. It wasn’t all good though. Especially with the hardware and bandwidth limitations of the average consumer in the early 2000s, coming across a Flash website would often result in an unpleasant experience in which the page was slow to react, would crash your browser, or even possibly freeze your computer. According to an article written by Mike Tee, a couple major reasons Flash support was discontinued was due to its security vulnerabilities and its difficulty integrating into mobile platforms. Since such a large portion of internet browsing is now conducted through mobile devices, it’s important for website creators to make their pages pleasant to look at and interact with on any device.
UI frameworks
User interface (UI) frameworks make the task of creating websites that are adaptive to any device (and its resolution) much simpler and more accessible to even novice developers. A framework provides a library of pre-developed website components including menus, buttons, formatted containers, and text input fields. While it still takes work to put these components together to make a functional and aesthetically pleasing website, it takes a lot less work and typically provides better results than having to create and format every aspect of a page from scratch. The widgets provided by a UI framework were developed with the concept of “mobile-first design” in mind. The basic idea of mobile-first design is that a website will look good and be easy to use on a small screen, and then simply adapt to a larger screen if needed. This is an important concept to have in mind since most development probably takes place on a larger screen. In my (limited) experience creating websites using only HTML and CSS, this concept has been inconceivable to implement. It takes enough effort to format a page for my 15.5 inch screen, but having it adapt to a smaller window size without it resulting in sideways scroll bars as well as ruining the proportions of different elements is something I simply don’t know how to do. For this reason, I am grateful to learn about and use UI frameworks, even though web design is not an aspect of computer science which I am particularly enamored by.
Modernization
At the time of writing this essay, it seems that just about any small business, charity, or personal project has a clean, adaptive, responsive, and modern-looking website. The barrier-to-entry for solid web design has seemed to have gone down, but it seems to have been at the cost of creative web design. I recently revisited the website of Gorillaz, who were one of my earliest favorite bands, and as I expected, it is no longer the flash wonderland I remember it to be. Now it’s essentially a cookie-cutter landing page with a modern menu linking to merchandise and social media pages. On the bright-side, this website works well when accessed through a phone and it probably won't crash anyone's browser.