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With all respect: I completely disagree. I think this looks great as is. Dividing it up, adding a bunch of extra CSS would make it less usable and readable for me. Of course, that tends to be subjective.

How would you know that?

The site is already divided into three sections: header, controls to the left, laptop list to the right. To style that accordingly won't make it in any way less useable or readable. Making the header look like a header would not affect you negatively in any way, or properly styling the pagination, or giving it a color scheme (even one based on white as background).

Really, this is a Show HN. Let's at least try to give OP proper feedback without resorting to head-in-the-sand subjectivity like that. "I'd prefer to have it look like my site I created for geocities with Frontpage" is not what will help OP presenting this to a potential employer, or making it a viable source of income.

> How would you know that?

To be fair, I can't. I'm basing it on how I see your suggestions in my head. But the way I interpret the changes are how I've seen other sites do it, and it just sounds worse to me. I don't like extra styling, as it ends up cluttering the display. I personally find color-schemes annoying. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd have to see how OP implements your suggestions before actually deciding.

> Really, this is a Show HN. Let's at least try to give OP proper feedback without resorting to head-in-the-sand subjectivity like that. "I'd prefer to have it look like my site I created for geocities with Frontpage" is not what will help OP presenting this to a potential employer, or making it a viable source of income.

I think you really need to take a breath here. I am giving OP proper feedback, which just happens to disagree with yours. Neither style is "right". They are both subjective preferences. I'm saying that I like the style he chose, and disagree with the "improvements" that you are suggesting. I fail to see how I'm sticking my head in the sand.

I would argue that keeping it simple is helping him. It makes the site more usable, less cluttered, faster to load, less maintenance and more easily navigable.

> I think you really need to take a breath here.

Maybe. You see, I hesitated after writing this, but then decided to stick with it. Just because I really am convinced that it is really bad advice. Based on my own sites (and pc-kombo.de is even in a related field), if you don't get the design at least near of being okay, people won't accept your site. Based on my studies, I know that usability does not get worse when giving it a proper design. And readability can simply (well, sometimes it's not that simple) be measured, but there is no reason at all it would get worse by doing the basics.

There is a small subset of people (socialized with another internet?) who really think the design of a site does not matter for them, or who disapprove of everything they think is modern design. Based on your comments, you are in that category. And some others commented in the same spirit here. Listening to those means making a site which 99% of internet users won't accept. At least as long as your site is not craigslist – but even current craigslist has more design than what I see on OPs site.

Not having a design is perfectly fine for a MVP. But not fine when going further. Stating otherwise actively hurts his chances of succeeding.

I'm not against modern design, I'm against over-design. IME sites work better and are more maintainable the simpler they are. If a design improves a site, then by all means, make it more usable. But to me, function > design, and I don't see how your suggestions would make the site better. I'm not saying you are objectively wrong, I'm just saying that I'd much rather use this site than pc-kombo.de or other overly-designed sites that take functionality away on the premise of "looking nice".

What are you talking about? Webdesign has never been about taking functionality away. I'm talking about separating page elements more properly, setting a link color, maybe setting a fitting background color, making sure elements stay big enough on a small screen, thinking about a logo for creating an identity, and having a look at the typography. How would any of this relate to negatively to the function of such a site?

That you think pc-kombo.de is overly designed I take as a compliment. Just saying, the design gave me the idea of adding the arrows at the side of the boxes, and gave a good place for the advanced menu, as well as the box control button for dismissing elements. It helped give users more functionality, more control over the site and their recommendations.

JonnieCache 3482 days ago

All it would really take IMO is picking a nice colour for the links to give the site some kind of recognisable brand/theme/personality. Perhaps move the other text away from pure black to decrease the contrast slightly.

PKop 3482 days ago

Just setting

  a { text-decoration: none, color: [something else] }

would go along way. I think that's all thats needed.

tehwalrus 3482 days ago

It doesn't look great on an android phone, though. And (possibly because of the missing viewport setting) I get crazy "let me zoom that for you" behaviour when I try to click on things.

It could do with some responsive styling.

Weird. Seems to work fine with FF on my android phone

cynwoody 3482 days ago

Comparing Firefox to Chrome on Android (Galaxy S7 Edge), I find Chrome works better.

In Firefox, the results section is too wide, resulting in text that is either too small to read or that requires left-right scrolling. However, the filter section smart-zooms nicely and is easy to click.

In Chrome, the results section is wrapped and of legible size and is easy to skim through by scrolling vertically. However, there is a vertical strip of missing pixels at the left, such that the number 10 on the last result is missing its numeral 1 and part of its 0. The filter section smart-zooms nicely and is easy to click.

In both, it would be nice to lose the underscoring on the links (a pet peeve of mine, fixed with a user style sheet on my laptop).

kaishiro 3482 days ago

Really? You don't have a tiny, hard to read filter bar on the left side?

It's a little small and hard to read, but not terrible. Additionally I don't get any weird zooming behavior that was described

Now I have to assume you are trolling. On a mobile phone (tested on an android with FF), you need to zoom to read any text that is not a headline properly. And there is no way that pagination is clickable without zooming in directly on it. Google is saying the same: https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly?id=....

That is not working fine.

Why would I troll about that? It looks a little small but otherwise OK to me. I can click on the pagination just fine. There are a lot of variables, especially with android when it comes to screen size, font, etc, so I'm guessing it just comes down to that.

kaishiro 3482 days ago

I'm really not trying to just be argumentative, but if you'd just look at the stylesheet you'd see it doesn't come down to that. There is no real attempt to give a good experience in a mobile context. And when it comes to basic responsive typography, there really aren't that many variables at all. Whether a screen is 320, 435, 515 wide, etc - a single query context could serve all those needs.

paradite 3482 days ago

With all respect: I completely disagree.

And that's fine. I'd be curious as to why though