Darkhack

Warning: Shameless Ego Boost Ahead - Use Caution

The best website was one that I made for my high school's website. Someone in this thread mentioned Ajaxian and it sort of reminded me of the design I had made. Our school colors were black and orange so I was limited in what I could work with. Unfortunately, the website is no longer up. The Way Back Machine never caught it and the staff is required to redesign the site each school year since it is a class and they need to be doing/learning something about web design. It was really awesome looking. We had probably one of the best graphics designers within 100 miles (hey, it's Kansas) and he could do some amazing stuff for the site. We had a really neat looking banner at the top and a nice menu and everything. Looks a lot like Ajaxian but with less content since it was just a school site. I'll admit that I appreciated the sites beauty more since it was something I had helped make, but I could admit if it looked like crap.

Off Topic: Holy crap, Ajaxian scared the shit out of me while I was typing this post. I have FlashBlock on so no flash stuff can play unless I click it, but apparently the Ajaxian website has an embedded video but with the controls hidden and the video was mostly audio so the image wasn't moving and it looked like just a normal image on the page and all of a sudden I heard a very faint voice mumbling. I flipped through my open tabs in Firefox for like five whole minutes before I figured out what was causing it. Mental illness runs in the family so I thought I was hearing voices. Jesus tap-dancing Christ that scared me!

Panarchy

www.tv.com

www.neowin.net

www.ndesign-studio.com

www.attherisingstar.com


^These are my favourite ones at the moment

Hmm... what about windowsedge.com? I can't understand if it is really crappy or really good... it's confusing.

PS: Rizon is still good! But no longer my favourite :shifty:

PPS: http://www.simplebits.com & http://www.ajaxian.com/ are very good as well!

MiKuS

windowsedge.com looks bad imo - i hate sites with a huge background image.

the style of ndesign-studio is good, another similar site that comes to mind after seeing that:
http://www.shinybinary.com/

i'm not a big fan of sites with a huge master head, it only works when the design looks insane.

DaWei

Actually, I like sites with a black background, dark red text, 4 zillion links, zero margins, and no negative space (there's an oxymoron for you). They're getting harder and harder to find, down to around 40-50 percent. I suppose people have to grow up sometime, but it sucks for the quality of the web.

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Jimbo

I have yet to find a website that I love. They're always missing at least one of good looks and fast load times. Maybe I'm picky... (and yes, I include performance in the design...)

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Darkhack

I agree, Windows Edge looks so terrible. I don't see how N.Design Studio reminded you of Shiny Binary. N.Design actually looks good. Shiny Binary is terrible. The banner image probably took a lot of time and skill to make but it still looks stupid. The page is also like 5 MB. They're called thumbnails. Not everyone has super-duper broadband. Even on a T1 line it would take like 40+ seconds to load.

Speaking of bad design though, the biggest thing I noticed when I worked on my high school website is how utterly stupid everyone was, including teachers. Remember how I said the site I made reminded me of Ajaxian? It actually sat in the development branch for months and months even when it was finished because everyone kept arguing with me and telling me it looked awful. You know what the popular design is that was decided to be put up in it's place; the one that is still up today? http://smnw.com

Yeah... exactly. Even when presented with beautiful designs they barfed at them and I'm left thinking, wtf? The one kid I was working with who is a sports jock and has only used a computer a few times in his life was amazed at the cheesiest of javascripts. It was 1998 all over again. He wanted stupid little teasers and mouse-overs. I thought he was kidding at first.

Our website is also based loosely on the school newspaper so in addition to having generic school information, we update with stories of what's happening around the school. So we kept a database of all the stories and used PHP to pull them along with any related images. I did all that work so nobody minded but after I left the staff to go to college it was apparently "too hard" and now they are creating HTML files for each and every story (we have hundreds per year).

I'm sorry for ranting. I'm just bitter that all my work and what was probably the best web design I had made went into the trash. If the design that had replaced it was even half as good (either visually or technically with the programming details like the database) I wouldn't have minded so much, but this didn't even come close. Thankfully my programmer and graphics designer buddies liked it and they had the same reaction I did and barfed at the "popular" one.

I live in Kansas (suburb of KC so I'm not in the middle of nowhere or anything like that, but the mentality is such that we are still slightly isolated from the rest of the country) and the term "Web 2.0" isn't known yet, but it's really going to suck when it catches on here. My friends know about computer stuff so I'm not alone but the average person in Kansas didn't even know about Windows Vista until August when back to school computer specials started coming about.

DaWei

You're lucky they never heard of web 2.0. Too bad they didn't appreciate your obvious skills. Move a little bit south. Maybe Oral Roberts University.

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Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

WaltP

I can tell you the sites I hate -- any site written in Flash. They are user unfriendly, take too long to load, and have too much annoying problems that drive me nuts.

Darkhack

There is a time and place to use Flash, but yes, usually those people are trying to win over users with "ooo shiny!"; forgetting that the shiny effect wears off in a matter of minutes and annoyance sets in when they actually try to get content and navigate the site.

Panarchy

Kanzas? "there's no place like home!"

But anyways, your design sounds interesting... can I have a screenshot of it? Because I never saw the design...