You probably build websites and think your website is special. You think your 15 megabyte parallax-ative home page is going to get you some Award banner you can add to the top corner of your site. You think your 5000-line jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow. Wrong. Let me describe your perfect website:
You are, Over-designing. Look at this website. It's a perfect website. Why the heck do you need to animate a trendy banner flag when I hover over that useless piece of button? You spent hours on it and added 150 kilobytes to your site, and someone jabbing at it on their iPad with fat sausage fingers will never see that. Not to mention blind people will never see that either, but they don't see any of your useless website.
You never knew it, but this is your perfect website. Here's why.
This entire page weighs less than the gradient-meshed facebook sharing logo on your blog. Did you seriously load 100kb of jQuery UI just so you could animate the background color of a div? You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a webfont just so you could say "Hi." at 100px height at the beginning of your site? You inefficient piece of human.
You brainless. You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no. Responsive means that it responds to whatever screensize it's viewed on. This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a Tamagotchi.
Look at this website. You can read it... that is, if you can read. It makes sense. It has hierarchy. It's using CSS3, HTML5 tags so you and your browser know what's in this site. That's semantics.
It has content on the screen. Your site has three bylines and link to your twitter account, but you spread it over 5 full screens and make me click some bobbing button to show me how cool the jQuery ScrollTo plugin is.
Cross-browser compatibility? Load this site in IE4. I dare you.
Why are you still delivering sites over HTTP? A old Atom 330 CPU from 2008 can perform AES-256-CBC encryption via OpenSSL at 110 megabits per second. A Xeon E5-2670 CPU without AES-NI enabled hits 444 megabits per second. With AES-NI enabled it hits a staggering 2.2 gigabits per second. Your server probably can’t even load your Javascript framework’s dependencies that fast.
TLS certificates are cheap. Seriously, you can even get them for free from Let’s Encrypt or WoSign.
Your webserver is perfectly capable of compressing HTML. A Atom 330 CPU can perform single-core
gzip -6 on random data at 51 megabits per second. A Xeon E5-2670 from 2012 can do this at 216
megabits per second. Your meme website isn’t as random as you think it is and will compress much faster.
It’s bad enough you’re forcing users to load 5MB of hero image and Javascript framework. Why are you making them reload it every time they visit your website? Bandwidth is cheap but it isn’t free. Via data charges or waiting, someone is paying for your laziness.
Like the man who's never grown out his beard has no idea what his true natural state is, you have no idea what a website is. All you have ever seen are skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a message. This is a real, unexaggerated website. Look at it. It's beautiful.
I'm not actually saying your site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You brainless fellows.
"Good design is as little design as possible."
~ Dieter Rams