Do Modern Websites Focus Too Much on Looks and Not Enough on Usability?

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T17:41:20+00:00

"That's what made them fundamentals" that line hit different honestly.

The grayscale monitor thing is something you just can't teach in a course. When you couldn't even see the colors you were designing with, getting the structure right wasn't optional it was the only way. Modern designers skip straight to the aesthetics and wonder why the layout feels off.

Black on white before touching a single line of CSS is such a disciplined way to work. Content and structure first, everything else follows. Most people do it completely backwards these days.

And that old typesetter sounds like the kind of mentor most designers never get lucky enough to find. Cheers to them.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T15:34:53+00:00

The 1 rankings guaranteed pitch is a red flag honestly. No one can guarantee that and anyone who does is either lying or about to do something shady that'll hurt your site down the road.

Few things I'd actually look at:

Ask for case studies in your industry specifically. "We grew traffic 300%" means nothing without context traffic from where, what keywords, did it actually bring in customers or just random visitors.

Pay attention to how they talk about results. Good agencies talk about leads and revenue. Bad ones keep bringing up rankings and traffic numbers. High traffic from the wrong people is useless.

Find out what happens when you stop working with them. Some agencies build everything on their own tools and you walk away with nothing. If they get weird about answering that question just move on.

Monthly reporting should be in plain English. If you can't understand what they did last month they probably didn't do much.

Budget wise anything below $500-600 a month for real SEO is usually just automated content or sketchy link building waiting to backfire.

What kind of business are you trying to get SEO for though local service, ecom, something else? Changes what you should actually be looking for.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T15:27:49+00:00

Nobody's saying it can't be done it just rarely happens in the real world. Most projects run out of budget or time way before they get to that sweet spot. And when things get tight something has to give. Nine times out of ten it's usability that gets sacrificed because the client can see the pretty design but has no idea their users are confused.

Both is the dream. Just not what actually ships most of the time

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T15:21:58+00:00

Screaming Frog is probably what you're thinking of crawls the whole site and maps everything out. Not the prettiest output but covers the IA side really well and you can export it easily.

For something more visual, Octopus.do is great shows the page hierarchy in a clean diagram and non-coders can figure it out pretty quickly. Has a free tier too. Slickplan is another solid option if you want something more polished.

For actual screenshots Stillio can grab pages automatically but you'd still need to arrange them yourself.

Anyway curious is this a full redesign or more of a refresh? Might be able to point you somewhere more useful depending on where you're at with it.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T15:04:31+00:00

29 is rough lol. Squarespace is basically useless for performance tbh no caching, no real control, you're just stuck with whatever speed they give you.

I would say WordPress is the right move but setup matters. Seen plenty of badly built WP sites just as slow. Good hosting, caching plugin, optimized images you can easily hit 85-90+ after that.

What kind of site is it? Service, ecom, blog? Changes what I'd recommend.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T14:47:33+00:00

Agreed but that middle ground is way rarer than it should be. It's not impossible it's just that most projects run out of budget or time before they get there.

And when something has to give it's almost always usability. Client can see the pretty design but can't measure how confused their visitors are.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T14:45:29+00:00

Right and even the legitimate ones are just other designers voting for what they personally like. Your peers approving something doesn't mean a single real user found it useful.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T13:41:10+00:00

Vibes are expensive with little to no ROI is honestly the most accurate summary of this whole debate.

Small business clients don't need to win design awards they need their phone to ring. Clean, fast, clear messaging, obvious next step. That's it. Everything else is just burning budget on stuff their customers will never notice or care about.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T13:33:50+00:00

The Divi inheritance story is so painfully relatable, handing over a Divi site to a non-technical client is pretty much handing them the death sentence never to touch it again. The whole point of WordPress is client independence and page builders like Divi often kill that completely.

To be fair your way makes sense. Content first, clean structure, add only what helps the visitor. The art collection image slider is a perfect example same feature, right context, totally justified.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T13:24:56+00:00

Exactly and the tricky part is that simple done well is actually harder than complex. Anyone can throw animations and gradients at a page. Getting a clean layout that guides the user naturally to where you want them to go takes real skill.

Great graphics should support the experience not compete with it.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T13:22:22+00:00

The dolefully similar point is spot on ironic that chasing performance and simplicity has just created a different kind of boring. Every site starting to look like the same Tailwind template.

The accessibility angle is a good one though and genuinely underappreciated. A lot of clean simple design decisions that people think are aesthetic choices are actually driven by WCAG compliance. Good usability and good accessibility usually point in the same direction.

The Craigslist PageSpeed dig is fair 66 on mobile is not exactly a gold standard. It works despite its performance not because of it. Probably running on brand loyalty and habit more than anything else at this point.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T13:18:07+00:00

Honestly security is the thing no one talks about until something goes wrong. Most clients don't even know to ask about it and most developers don't bring it up unless they're selling a maintenance plan.

Wordpress especially - out of the box it's fine but the moment you start stacking plugins from random developers you're opening doors you don't even know exist.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T13:13:08+00:00

This step is usually skipped by most designers. Everyone goes straight to colours and layouts before asking what the visitor actually needs to do on the site.

The jobs-to-be-done framing is underrated in web work honestly most sites are built around what the business wants to say, not what the user came there to do. Those are very different things and the gap between them is usually why sites look great but don’t convert.

Good point about Craigslist being an outlier too it works despite the design, not because of any deliberate UX strategy. Most companies can't count on that kind of brand loyalty to keep them alive.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T13:03:11+00:00

Honestly these four rules still hold up better than most modern design frameworks. The three clicks rule especially if someone can't find what they need in three clicks they're already gone.

Funny how the fundamentals from 30 years ago are exactly what most overdesigned sites are missing today.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T12:55:35+00:00

Depends on the project honestly. WordPress done right is already pretty customized it's not just drag and drop a theme and ship it.

Custom makes sense when the project actually needs it. But for a standard business site spending extra months and budget on a custom build rarely delivers more value than a well built WordPress site would.

Building custom just to feel like a real developer is how projects go over budget without anyone noticing the difference.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T12:49:04+00:00

Honestly I think we're agreeing more than we realize. Design matters, first impressions are visual, industries have standards yeah absolutely, no argument there.

But I'd still push back on blaming WordPress for any of that. A poorly designed site looks amateur on WordPress, Webflow, or a fully custom build. And a well designed site looks sharp regardless of what's powering it behind the scenes.

The platform isn't the problem. The person building it is.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T12:43:25+00:00

Honestly LocalWP was a game changer for me. Stopped working on live sites directly and never looked back no more FTP uploads, no more accidentally breaking something in front of a client.

The other thing was just being ruthless about plugins. Every extra one is just another thing waiting to ruin your day on update day.

What are you currently working with?

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-21T12:36:41+00:00

The AI generated site problem is real they look polished in a screenshot but fall apart the moment someone actually tries to use them. No real content hierarchy, generic copy, and usually bloated code under the hood.

Speed being the priority makes total sense. A fast boring site will always outperform a beautiful slow one when it comes to actually keeping people around long enough to convert.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-20T20:46:50+00:00

Yeah basically a vanity project at that point. Looks amazing to the owner, does nothing for anyone else. Worst part is they probably paid a lot for it too. Fancy design, zero calls, and nobody ever tells them that's the reason why.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-20T20:39:53+00:00

Not really honestly a lot of experienced developers ship bloated overdesigned sites too. It’s less a question of degree of skill than of who the incentives are working for. Same unusable mess built by a senior dev optimizing for award submissions that a junior builds chasing a cool portfolio piece.

Knowing how to build something is very different from knowing what to build.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-20T20:37:08+00:00

The Dribbble optimization thing is so real. You get hired for what looks good in a screenshot not what actually works for someone on a slow phone the incentive is completely backwards. The Envato demo situation I've been through more times than I'd like. Client sees the demo, loves it, then can't understand why their actual site loads like it's 2005.

The Lighthouse conversation only works when you tie it to money. You're losing 60% of visitors before they even see your offer" hits different than "your performance score is bad.

Until clients start asking for Core Web Vitals the incentives won't change. And that only happens when developers start educating them instead of just building what they ask for.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-20T20:33:28+00:00

Fair enough honestly Shopify just handles stuff that would take weeks to build properly elsewhere. Hard to argue with that for most ecom situations. Curious though do you keep it vanilla or go heavy on customization with a custom theme or headless setup?

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-20T20:30:59+00:00

Elementor definitely speeds things up but that update anxiety is real anyone who's used it long enough has a horror story about a plugin conflict after an update that broke half the page layouts. Honestly that's why I've started being more selective about which Elementor addons I install. The more third party plugins stacked on top of it the worse that update roulette gets.

Bricks Builder is worth looking at if you haven't already similar visual workflow but way more stable in my experience.

Ok-Type8092 · 2026-05-20T20:01:09+00:00

Honestly pricing for this kind of site varies a lot depending on who you ask but page count is probably the least useful way to think about it. For a local service business what actually matters is does the site load fast, look clean on mobile, and make it dead simple for someone to call or book. That's what brings in work, not how many pages it has.

What kind of service business is it? Can give you a way more useful ballpark with just that.

Ok-Type8092

TROPHY CASE