Post A8Y1urQXpc3e9S56OW by fluffy@social.handholding.io
(DIR) More posts by fluffy@social.handholding.io
(DIR) Post #A8Y1urQXpc3e9S56OW by fluffy@social.handholding.io
2021-06-22T15:21:14.510184Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Is it just weblate now or what do I use for frontend to look good cc @quad
(DIR) Post #A8Y7VoumdOhoqSfUVE by finlaydag33k@social.linux.pizza
2021-06-22T16:22:45Z
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@fluffy How do you mean "what do you use for frontend to look good"?You mean to build a nice front-end for your website or? (mainly confused because I don't know why you'd add Weblate into the mix, since that is for translations)
(DIR) Post #A8Y7VpQKk5wWQJQggC by fluffy@social.handholding.io
2021-06-22T16:23:55.946905Z
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@finlaydag33k I want a vc or exec to look at it and be impressed
(DIR) Post #A8YGCSEHea1qZZd6mm by quad@weeaboo.space
2021-06-22T18:01:16.331643Z
3 likes, 0 repeats
@fluffy I have never used any front-end.All HTML/CSS/JS I’ve done was from scratch. I can’t even name a frontend toolkit more recent than bootstrap
(DIR) Post #A8YGLg9nEyJENHvbCS by rozenglass@anime.website
2021-06-22T18:02:56.028772Z
2 likes, 1 repeats
@fluffy @finlaydag33k in my experience, participating in some startup competitions, and looking for investors, and stuff, the VCs seem to care little about the looks, or even the technical concepts. My experience is that they seemed much more affected by two things: First, the founders' personality, charisma, ambition, enthusiasm, perceived intelligence & sharpness, etc. They are mostly not judging your project, they are judging _you_, because they know they are not betting on your project, but they are betting on your team. Second, they are very interested in market analysis stuff, and statistics; they want to know the potential market size for this product, the potential revenue, what the competitors are, what edge you plan on using to exceed your competitors, what are your monetization plans, etc.Also, a hugely effective factor is already existing results. Nothing catches the eyes of investors much as numbers of already existing customers, or already present revenue. You can talk to them for an hour about your great idea, and the problems it solves, and how good the UX and UI and technical side are, but nothing, to them, can trump the words "and we already have 5,000 users, and 200 paying customers". That there is near-instant victory.Of course, not saying that there are no investors that are interested in idea stuff and concepts, but they don't seem to be the majority (at least in my locale, Turkey, and in my experience, which is more on the side of financial & banking industries). You can probably find more idea-inclined VCs in some pockets of creativity, like Y-Combinator, and similar Silicon-Valley ventures, but the competition there is fierce; you'll be going against people trying to do the weirdest most cutting-edge things, and they still judge your person and personality first and foremost, before considering your ideas (at least afair reading some Paul Graham essay, one of the founders of Y-Combinator).Now, for the main question of how to make a frontend look good, my advice is: hire, or partner with, good UX and UI designers who know the web, and know their stuff, pay them good, and let them do their magic, with input from you, and from some good representitive users, for best results. Barring that, you have to do it yourself. Start with the UX, because UI, however beautiful, will not amount to anything if the UX is bad, and with a white board, or flow chart drawing tool, or a mind-map, or even some paper and a pen, draw and think thoroughly through the flow and user experience and use-cases of at least the main minimal-viable features of your application, and then implement them as the simplest possible prototype, using the least amount of libraries you can tolerate, and preferably no big frameworks. Go for the most neutral default look, with default text inputs and buttons and everything. You probably should have less than a hundred lines of CSS here at this stage. The prototype is there for you to test and get a feel of how good the UX is, and if it fast and efficient enough. Maybe even give it to a few friends and family members, or power-users and experts in the domain, to try it out and get some feedback as fast and early as possible.When you feel like you got the UX right _enough_, then it is time for the UI and style. Now, here, there are multiple ways to go about it; you can either pick up your Gimp or Inkscape, and go through your website, page by page, beautifying every page to make it look good, or, you can think about the whole site holistically, and try to build a general visual style guide and brand identity for the whole project. With this approach you first define fundamentals, like general "feelings" the design should invoke, and the primary color pallet, and such, and then you go through your pages, separating independent clear-cut components, and designing the visual and interaction style for every component in isolation, to make a reusable consistent style, and in the end, have a foundation that can be used to build any new page or feature, without having to specially think much about its stylistic design every time.Both approaches have their good and bad. The first approach might be considered "dated" by some, but only because we are heading into a more consumerist internet, where everything must be reusable and cost-effective. The first approach tailors the style of every page or feature to that feature specifically. This usually results in the UI enhancing the UX, and can be a very unique creative tool, with much freedom, in the hands of a good designer. The second approach is, like I said, cost-effective, and it is usually more coherent in the hands of less experienced designers, or a large team of designers, _but_ you have to test well, because sometimes the design-in-isolation approach results in weird unanticipated interactions in some places, especially the less-trodden paths.Anyways, my position is that any thinking about making things that _actually_ look good, in a professional manner, never starts with the frameworks or pre-made assets, but at the fundamental _design_ level, made specifically for your own application. My experiences with multiple projects adopting the generic "good looks" of an existing framework is that you get "generic" at best, and "completely broken" at worst (or more specifically, whenever you try to do something remotely unconventional with your web application).Oh, and all the talk about "saving time" by using frameworks is rubbish in my experience. With any complex application, especially with multiple team members, you spend more time fighting frameworks usually, than actually building stuff. I worked for years with Bootstrap (and like 3 or 5 other CSS frameworks), DevExtreme, Teleric, Ionic, that Material toolkit for Angular, and Wordpress themes, and nothing _ever_ beat writing things from scratch in terms of long-term time efficiancy. It is a trap. You usually get things up and running much quicker with the frameworks, because you have generic requirements at first, then as your requirements become more sophisticated, and you adopt to your domain, it becomes a never-ending maintenance and modification up-hill battle. Building things, methodically, from scratch, "the right way" is slower at first, mostly because of the reasearch overhead, but in exchange you usually gain long-term stability, easier to maintain and modify code, mainly because _you know how it actually works_, then, the better and more fitting UX and the expanded knowledge and experience of you personally, are the icing on the cake.The more ready-for-use libraries and frameworks you use, the more generic your frontend will look, and the harder it is to depart from their collective preconceived assumptions. You will suffer more fighting the frameworks to make them do what you want, and it will be harder to reason about bugs and weird interactions between them. Not to mention the maintenance hell it becomes where every week you have 30 libraries to upgrade, 10 of which are breaking changes, and 5 are important security issues... Every week, _forever_.aaaanyways, another rant, with a hint of negativity, because writing random stuff on fedi is better than me sitting here being depressed in this dark room :3: oh, and disclaimer, I know nothing, take what you will at your own risk :hatdance:here's a cute rabbit maid to make things better:
(DIR) Post #A8YsIgSlRWOOiGngp6 by fluffy@social.handholding.io
2021-06-23T01:08:12.513731Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@rozenglass @finlaydag33k thanks rozenglass for the detailed notes. I won't be pitching to vc, but, that is simply the look I am going for. You are right of course that I should simply get someone who is good at uiux onboard for it. Maybe my hopes of looking like a million bucks while paying at most sixty for some theme are unrealistic.
(DIR) Post #A8YshUm62Ji1hbfqU4 by fluffy@social.handholding.io
2021-06-23T01:12:41.050734Z
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@quad ah so when you wrote about it earlier, it was not you but someone else?
(DIR) Post #A8ZFMGFFA2LhVG9QES by quad@weeaboo.space
2021-06-23T05:26:31.636452Z
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@fluffy I'm not sure how this is related. I don't even know what "weblate" is.What that thread says is that companies hire consultants to use a website builder.If you don't know what a website builder is, it means they can't figure out stuff like what's shown in this ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ch_rkRwk1M
(DIR) Post #A8ZFWDPWYMBPbohqPw by fluffy@social.handholding.io
2021-06-23T05:28:22.059417Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@quad s/weblate/webflow/
(DIR) Post #A8ZFX05hYqRSaWoCp6 by quad@weeaboo.space
2021-06-23T05:28:28.667889Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@fluffy Or if you mean the part about being involved in setting up sites on webflow. That mostly just means helping them add DNS records and other basic stuff.I have never made a website myself on Webflow. I have used Squarespace like 10 years ago because they had a deal that gave you your first year free or something
(DIR) Post #A8ZFYkbK7huN7sQz6e by quad@weeaboo.space
2021-06-23T05:28:48.618941Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@fluffy No, I have never used webflow