How do you guys/gals feel about when different tech is needed? By tech, I mean JS, jQuery, and CSS mainly. For example, a lot of startup sites feature this big ole impressive-looking “landing page” but even though I think that looks nice, there are a ton of successful sites out there that don’t have anything like that and do just fine.
In fact, I’ve found that a lot of tech peoples’ websites look rather different actually. For example, CSS total expert Lea Verou’s site looks, rather… Regular. She is known to be a master with CSS and has not only authored the book : “CSS Secrets - Better Solutions to everday web design problems,” but she also worked for the W3C who make CSS itself.
Same goes for Ryan “The CSS Ninja” Seddon and Estelle Weyl, pro CSS lecturer.
I notice a lot of hip restaurants, designers, and startups tend to have these trendy, “hipster look” to their page which tends to feature gigantic oversized images, background video, and a large landing page that scrolls for a long time with alternating modules.
As a developer, I started to get sucked into this belief that all sites need to look like that to be cool or to gain views, but to be honest, I prefer some of the old-fashioned stuff, not to mention, it’s much quicker performance wise.
So that brings up the question: If you have the freedom to design a site, assuming a database and back-end aren’t really needed (ie no login system or need to store data other than maybe blog posts), what look and tech would you choose? The more I learn about CSS, the more I realize, it can do a ton more than I thought. Many times when I thought I needed to use jQuery, actually, CSS could get the job done.