This is the reason why I had a long and bloody fight regarding the homepage of the company I work at. And I won.
Management wanted a new homepage, marketing wanted the homepage to be - and this is a citation - “Emotional!!! And we want ENGAGEMENT!!!” (For context: We are building industrial machinery).
Marketing got an external offer (behind my back) and a mockup of the homepage based on React with animations and an dynamic background which turned every PC we looked at it with into a space heater. And they wanted to spend > 15 k € on it.
I - as something yanks would call a CTO - said no.
Everything turned quiet “Emotional!!!” for a couple of months, but in the end I won with the argument that we are building FUCKING BORING INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY, our costumers seldom change and if so, they are also from some big boring industrial company who already know us because we are in this business since Ugh, the first CEO chiseled the first iteration of our landmark product with a flintstone in 15000 BC.
The rebuild of the homepage resulted in something that is quiet nice looking… but that can also work perfectly fine in fucking DILLO!
Yeah good call, idek your company, site, or industry, and I don’t need to. As someone who has to deal with the same shit from a customer perspective I can’t hate it enough.
Professional websites should all aspire to be like McMaster-Carr’s, “you know why you are here why should we bug you with bullshit, now what size roll pins did you need?” Literally one of my favorite websites of all time, no muss no fuss.
Way back in 2001 when Adobe flash was the exciting new thing on the web, I was the network/firewall admin for the data-center hosting the company website. I didn’t get to argue about the site itself, since they had Microsoft in to do that. I did win the argument against the Microsoft engineers wanting to put the site outside the firewall for “performance”. Needless to say my ass was on the line if performance was impacted.
Sure enough, the big launch day arrives, the Superbowl adds run, and the complaints all start coming in about how terribly the site was performing. They beat the hell out of it in the lab, so they knew with absolute certainty that the firewall was to blame. Lots of higher-ups were suddenly aware that I existed, which is never a good thing for a network admin.
I dove into troubleshooting and had my answer in less than ten minutes. The front page was a monstrosity made entirely of flash that displayed nothing until the entire page loaded - graphics and all. That worked well enough on a high speed network but, back in 2001, most people at home were on dialup. A little quick math on the size of the download had it taking over 40 seconds to just see the front page.
The site got a really rapid rewrite, and I was off the hook.
This is the reason why I had a long and bloody fight regarding the homepage of the company I work at. And I won.
Management wanted a new homepage, marketing wanted the homepage to be - and this is a citation - “Emotional!!! And we want ENGAGEMENT!!!” (For context: We are building industrial machinery).
Marketing got an external offer (behind my back) and a mockup of the homepage based on React with animations and an dynamic background which turned every PC we looked at it with into a space heater. And they wanted to spend > 15 k € on it.
I - as something yanks would call a CTO - said no.
Everything turned quiet “Emotional!!!” for a couple of months, but in the end I won with the argument that we are building FUCKING BORING INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY, our costumers seldom change and if so, they are also from some big boring industrial company who already know us because we are in this business since Ugh, the first CEO chiseled the first iteration of our landmark product with a flintstone in 15000 BC.
The rebuild of the homepage resulted in something that is quiet nice looking… but that can also work perfectly fine in fucking DILLO!
Yeah good call, idek your company, site, or industry, and I don’t need to. As someone who has to deal with the same shit from a customer perspective I can’t hate it enough.
Professional websites should all aspire to be like McMaster-Carr’s, “you know why you are here why should we bug you with bullshit, now what size roll pins did you need?” Literally one of my favorite websites of all time, no muss no fuss.
Way back in 2001 when Adobe flash was the exciting new thing on the web, I was the network/firewall admin for the data-center hosting the company website. I didn’t get to argue about the site itself, since they had Microsoft in to do that. I did win the argument against the Microsoft engineers wanting to put the site outside the firewall for “performance”. Needless to say my ass was on the line if performance was impacted.
Sure enough, the big launch day arrives, the Superbowl adds run, and the complaints all start coming in about how terribly the site was performing. They beat the hell out of it in the lab, so they knew with absolute certainty that the firewall was to blame. Lots of higher-ups were suddenly aware that I existed, which is never a good thing for a network admin.
I dove into troubleshooting and had my answer in less than ten minutes. The front page was a monstrosity made entirely of flash that displayed nothing until the entire page loaded - graphics and all. That worked well enough on a high speed network but, back in 2001, most people at home were on dialup. A little quick math on the size of the download had it taking over 40 seconds to just see the front page.
The site got a really rapid rewrite, and I was off the hook.
“Works fine in Dillo” is a golden endorsement.