Unpopular opinion: there are bad examples, just like with any design trend, but the basic layout scheme for most websites for desktop use peaked with the "thin top bar & nav, 2-3 columns, left of which may also be navigation" standard style of the mid to late '00s.
Other designs are more convenient if you want a very easy-to-write responsive layout, and some sites do actually need something different, but that was as good as we've seen, in general, for desktop. You can't do it now because it "looks old" and people will assume your site is defunct, but it's the best.
Every time I get a flashy new modern design pop up, I'll just assume it will be gone in a year or so I just close the tab and try to move on to the next one..
Sometimes I'd get some bootstrappy looking website.. I assume not even half the buttons on that page work, don't even bother trying anymore, and move on..
Strongly agree and thought I was alone in this thinking. A flashy new web-design makes me immediately think "VC, smoke and mirrors salesy BS, here today gone tomorrow". If I don't see links to "Screenshots" "Docs" and "News" immediately in my view on the landing page, I peel out.
The new one sucks, but the old one sucks too imo. I know you don't say old websites were great but I've seen alot of people saying that and yet their examples are bad too, usually they look simple and efficient but they're horrible, like spanning the whole page or not enough empty spaces or bad use of colors.
Hey if empty spaces and bad use of colors are all you can complain about, then that's a win IMO. At least it still works, which only time will tell for current websites. But I have this sneaky feeling that time wont be so friendly.
It might "work", but it's almost entirely content-free. It might as well be a blank page with the old "Under Construction" gif everyone used in the early 90s for all the information it gives.
In fact, the first time I looked at it, I didn't even realize there was anything there, because it was just some random graphic that filled the whole window with no indication that I could scroll down for more non-content. If you ask me that website fails in pretty much every way it can fail.
Yeah, that newer site loads slower, messes up my scroll, and is makes it harder to find the content you are looking for. It is the kind of site that makes me navigate away quickly because I don't want to waste my time working around their bad UX.
I have a decent spec PC with 32 GB of RAM and a 500 Mbps connection and that site just straight up seemed to have "hung" for a long time before loading that ugliness.
What I really like about the original (not perfect) website is they understood WHY you would go to the website: to download winamp, or see what was new and download an update. Those are the top reasons, all other things like "news" are secondary and down the page.
There's also https://skins.webamp.org/, which, while looking at first glance like an image gallery, actually loads each skin into the fully-interactive WebAmp client as a way of previewing the skin.
Winamp skins were surprisingly restrictive, though; you couldn't really skin Winamp in a way that impeded its functionality / created mystery-meat navigation. Every Winamp skin was fundamentally just a set of textures applied to the same standard controls layout: https://skins.webamp.org/
That was true for "classic" skins, but starting with Winamp 3, Winamp supported free form "modern" skins that were defined in XML and had a custom scripting language so that the author could define their own behavior.
True; though I'm pretty sure the WinAmp anyone here actually has any level of nostalgia for, is WinAmp 2. WinAmp 3 was so lacklustre that they brought back a lot of WinAmp 2 stuff and called the result WinAmp 5. (And then everyone continued to use the Classic skins, which WinAmp 5 supported.)
If the form impeded function, it was easy to change. Some skins even made sure to cover all of Winamp's sections properly. The Invader Zim skin appealed to my 15-year-old tastes and still offered visible, functional controls with a readable playlist. Some skins looked cool, but if they removed options, they weren't used other than to show off to friends on occasion
This website doesn't even run smoothly on my overpowered gaming desktop. Back in 2000 I'd have never thought we'd be at the point where I can run games in 4K happily but not scroll through a website without it lagging up.
Much that was "obviously" bad in the mid '00s is good now. Mixing markup and style, heavy reliance on vector graphics and drawing things with CSS at runtime. Flash reborn as this sort of thing, but with much shittier creation tools and higher memory use.
Well, like most people, I've found streaming music is much more convenient than maintaining my own library and that's the way I listen to music most of the time. The discovery features those platforms offer are also welcome.
The print design people have really taken over web site designs these days. This would have been a very slick and expensive brochure in paper form, and we don't see that many of those in paper form because of the printing cost.
