[Joe8Bit]

> Websites shouldn't all look the same. We prefer campy, kitschy, messy, imperfect.

I really like the design aesthethic this product encourages. There's so much charm and fun and eccentricity that's lost in a web where full-height responsive image backgrounds and blocky design frameworks are ubiquitous.

If this can help people express just a little bit of the wild creativity of things like early 2000's MySpace layouts or GeoCities pages I'll be a big fan!

[keithnz]

I think now that many live in a youtube/twitter/twitch/facebook/insta sandbox where you can't customize your "space" very much, those days of people crafting their own corner of the internet is really gone.

[aetherspawn]

I can imagine that this product would transition very well into a social network that creatives, artists and such would find very appealing.

[tkgally]

My daughter is a professional illustrator. I don’t often show her things I learned about on HN, but I just showed her this site and she loves it. She has already signed up and is playing with her new site now.

[chiefalchemist]

Yes!! Why not, the website as art? As the medium and the message? A network of creative expression? Or as a "diary" where every entry is more scrapbook-y and less uniform blog?

Could be fun. We need more fun.

[indigochill]

Honestly, because it takes work. I'm not even talking about technical work, but creative work. To do this well, you want to think about your message and then about how to convey that message not just in the content, but in how the content is presented (sometimes geocities-esque chaos isn't quite the right vibe). Then you need to figure out how to fit that presentation into the assumptions of your web technology (I personally feel like the DOM is a straitjacket, but I'll concede since I don't work heavily in the front-end myself, maybe there are cute hacks that make it less so, short of just making the page a full canvas for something else like three.js)

Anyway, I've developed two "fun" pages myself, playing around with alternative ways to present content on the web:

1. https://maxsond.github.io/ (website traversal as interactive fiction)

2. http://tilde.town/~indigo/ (website traversal as pseudo-CLI)

Neither of them really flesh it out to what one might consider a full website, but are more light-weight experiments in alternative ways webpages can present content.

[rchaud]

> To do this well, you want to think about your message and then about how to convey that message

We all have to do some version of this in PowerPoint for school or for our jobs. We can go nuts with PPT transitions and animations, but we usually don't.

This is the same principle. You can use it to make a nice Squarespace like site, or go full lo-fi punk rock zine if you want. IMO that's what computers promised in the '80s and later with desktop publishing software. It's been missing from the web for far too long.

[chiefalchemist]

Work? Or time? Hobbies aren't "work"? Time sucked up by FB or Tw isn't work? If that tool / platform gives me a way to expess myself and I want to express myself, that's not work.

[an_opabinia]

I don't know, on the other hand, "random" is kind of a tired aesthetic.

Little inspires less confidence about someone's creativity than schizophrenic jumbles of gifs.

Besides, there wasn't a reduction in fun and eccentricity. So lets permit for a second that being "random" and being fun and eccentric are the same thing (they're not). Part of fun and eccentric moved to video games, the real safe space on the Internet for it. Part of it went away because personal websites became public facing destinations in a way MySpace and Geocities pages never really were.

And before you say that MySpace was a public facing destination, it is proving my point that musicians rapidly moved away from it long before Spotify homogenized the way we access music - it wasn't a music industry thing. It's that Instagram does a better job at doing what MySpace did, and it's because non-random people just communicate with pictures of themselves, particularly their bodies, as the lowest common denominator.

Why is the loss of "wild creativity" no real great loss? Ultimately we can appreciate how hard it is to design nice looking stuff a lot more. Even nostalgia for that old Internet you're talking about is kind of toxic, especially to people who are genuinely random, because nostalgia is a huge obstacle to getting people to try new things. And that's why maybe those blocky design frameworks are here to stay - because stuff that feels visually familiar on something that doesn't really matter, like a website, convinces the visitor to try something new that does matter - whatever you're writing, composing, making, etc. that you're putting on the web in the first place.

[h0l0cube]

> I don't know, on the other hand, "random" is kind of a tired aesthetic.

In graphic design (as I learnt it 20 years ago) there's broadly two categories, stable and dynamic. A stable design follows the rules, has quite a logical structure, and even a dilettante can easily use templates to make one without even understanding the rules all that well.

OTOH, to execute a dynamic design well you need to have a strong intuition for aesthetics, as well as a deep understanding of the rules. My teacher put it more plainly, you need to understand the rules to break them properly - otherwise it just looks like you screwed up.

The tool provides full freedom to break the rules, it doesn't mean everyone will break them well, but it does open more possibilities for a capable designer. And if there's anything tired, it's the same-y stable designs that cover almost the entirety of the web.

Edit: changed quote

[MattRix]

Seeing websites as just being a tool to get you to the thing “that does matter” is a shame. There’s a place for that for sure, but that’s all the modern web is now. I miss the time when the site itself was an expression of the person who made it.

[benbristow]

Reminds me of Piczo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piczo)

Was a website in the mid 00's where you could build your own website (anameofyourchoosing.piczo.com) and then decorate it using a WYSIWYG editor via drag and drop. Was really popular with kids when I was in primary school (including myself).

There were no templates or any grid systems etc, you'd start with a totally blank white page and you'd just add different premade widgets or HTML snippets to the page, customise the background etc. etc.

Made for some interesting designs to say the least. You'd have to be pretty good at it to make anything that looked professional due to the impreciseness of it all though.

Shame there doesn't seem to be really much archived of the service or any of the sites, unlike Geocities. You can see some examples of sites if you look on Google Images though.

[open-source-ux]

"There's so much charm and fun and eccentricity that's lost in a web where full-height responsive image backgrounds and blocky design frameworks are ubiquitous."

This reminds me of this web design "meme" from 2016: Which one of the two possible websites are you currently designing?

https://twitter.com/jongold/status/694591217523363840

Five years on, and it still holds true today.

[duxup]

Is there a way to ...see this design aesthetic outside their main page?

[rchaud]

Not sure if this is what you mean, but I thought Basecamp's homepage kinda resembles MMM's landing page:

https://basecamp.com/

[duxup]

Thank you, feels very friendly.

[jonplackett]

MySpace was immediate reference too. I miss the jankiness and imperfections of the 2000s web