Whither the Simple Website

I'd like to lodge a formal complaint. I figure doing so anonymously via the Internet to an audience made up almost entirely of bots and spiders would be just as effective as any other method.

Websites. They're too cluttered. Call me old-fashioned, but back in my day, websites didn't get bogged down with auto-playing embedded videos and rapidly rotating banner ads. They got bogged down with a bunch of animated gifs of hamsters dancing and wav files of Captain Picard and we liked it that way.

Thank goodness there are still some websites that recognize the simple pleasure of taking information from, and navigating around, a sparsely-designed, (mostly) ad-free.

I'm no cyber-Luddite. I got me a real smart smartphone, one of them new-fangled gadgets, plus a big old computer that takes up a chunk of the wall even though when you turn it sideways it's barely there. I'm screened up.

But, I also got this five- or six-year-old laptop what just sputters along and eventually gets things done. I keep it because I know it so well I can play it like an instrument, strumming out tunes with my fingers, singing for my supper with words. I keep it because it's still a trusty steed.

That old offspring doesn't much like these turbo-charged websites that hold the hostage while playing a video ad I didn't expect and don't want. It balks at those, yes it does.

What's wrong with simple understated elegance presented politely on your screen? Examples to the negative are abominable and everywhere; an example to the good, however, is found on - surprisingly enough - on Modern Luxury Magazine's website. Check out an example webpage at Barry Beck. The entire layout incorporates just two colors, as far as I can tell; the font is distinctive but legible, and - I cannot emphasize this enough - there are no auto-loading videos, no egregiously gaudy adverts, nothing to make a tired old CPU cry.

The clunker can dig it. Webmasters, take heed: More isn't necessarily better. You want me to watch a video, you're going to have to learn how to earn my click. Don't shove it very slowly into my face.