Now, I haven’t designed web pages professionally since the nineties, having realized that the dotcom crash was coming partway through college.
But I still get opinionated about the subject once in a while.
The story begins with myself and one of my friends who does do web design professionally. I had just helped her move and we were kind of looking for somewhere to get some lunch. She wanted sandwiches.
I’m not up on good sandwich places and she just moved, so obviously she’s not totally up on that. I suggest we browse Yelp, given that’s what all the cool young twentysomething-and-thirtysomething hipsters do these days. (Even though it’s mostly a giant scam that extracts protection money from poor small businesses)
We come upon a sandwich place with a website. It looks elegant. It’s got a bunch of fancy flash, such that you can page through the menu by clicking at the right section of the virtual flash menu. The annoying part was that you had to click on the exact corner to make it change pages for you.
We both rapidly realize that, because of the overblown flash presentation of the site, we have absolutely no desire to actually go there.
Eventually, I realize that, even though we were presently in Palo Alto and one of the best (and few remaining) butcher shops in the area was in Mountain View, it wasn’t actually that far away… so we went there instead.