However, all of this brings up the issue of functionality in comparison design. I'm sure there were websites at the time that had spent money and time on a good design, but those aren't the ones that succeeded. The ones that ended up becoming the internet giants of 2011 were the ones with hideous interfaces and childish logos, but evidently with great functionality. Does that mean that all the time we are spending on design is useless, or that design itself is useful and has become a bigger factor in what makes a website successful today?
I fully agree with you there. If your product has potential, design is not a key factor. Design becomes a key factor when your product characteristics are similar, if not equal, with competitors. That's the main reason we are seeing a surge of design in web/UI lately: higher competition and lack of innovation.
This also reaffirms my theory that getting there first, when it comes to features, has much higher impact than long design phases (that can eventually be postponed).
Except maybe for "ben the bodyguard", these websites are pretty much all "design" and no "web". In fact, most of these look like they were made straight out of Illustrator (a couple of those websites are actually huge images stitched together with no text!).
There's no need for that. Users/contributors will do whatever they want with the source already. That includes hacking the source for private purposes only. Github is the pinnacle of that attitude (which in my opinion is not social coding at all -- but I digress).
Of course, the articles misses an important point: talking to the maintainer/author first. If you were about to do a big change, would you know if there were any chance to be integrated first? Maybe knowing if someone is already working on it? (heavy refactoring comes to mind). I've gained precious insights about design by simply talking to authors before starting to work on a contribution, saving my time countless times.
If your intention is doing a change no matter what, then you're not really interested in _contributing_.
It depends. If you are the main author of a large project, and you look forward to extend it by taking contributions in a direction that carries any meaning to you, integrating code at random won't magically result in a better project.
As the author an maintainer of several small FOSS projects, I rarely receive pull requests that I can merge right away. In that sense, a distributed VCS doesn't really improve over the patch-by-mail approach for random contributions (it does helps cooperation among regulars however).
I can also tell you right away that a FOSS project without direction or maintainer quickly dies, independently of the VCS. Successfull forks are very rare. Mostly, projects with good potential but no maintainer get simply dumped and reimplemented by another programmer.
If you are a maintainer, you will appreciate all the points the authors is making. If you are making a contribution, adhering to all the points will increase the odds of your change to make it quickly and improve the software.
Also, conversely as a contributor, I don't spend time on projects which have no maintainer or lack direction anymore. Having the source of a project (especially large) sounds useful at first, until you realize that maintaining it without the inner knowledge is a daunting task. It only makes sense if you are willing to use it extensively (and become the new the-facto maintainer).
Strange that I've seen no-one actually side with the small businesses here.
It's true: small business are lagging behind in web presence, though it's mostly our fault.
When such business took a sneak-peak in the web, 10 years ago, there was actually no strong reason to be on the web. The people behind the business themselves didn't use the web as a resource-for-everything as we see it today. They considered (and rightly so) a web presence just as a business facade.
Moreover, that presence cost them a fortune, for mostly what today we consider as a flash nightmare.
I'm sure that now people realize what they would like to see in their website, because that's the way they expect websites to be: an actual, useful service for the people that come to their business.
That means more money to be spent however, and if you want a nice, decently done website, probably with some sort of customized service behind it, and considering eventual maintenance costs, it probably means spending the same amount you spent 10 years ago, plus a yearly figure which is certainly larger that what you're spending now.
Of course, it also means expanding your business on the web, for the first time, really. I think that many people realize that, and with time (read: money) they will move on. I don't buy the fact that people don't know what web means anymore.
However, I'm quite confident that whatever new website they're building now, it
will require a complete re-do in another 5 years time due to changing trends and technologies (which in customer's minds reads as "no real reason"). And that's exactly the reason I agree with them. You really need to have a strong business return in exchange for such a waste of time an money.
I fully agree with you there. If your product has potential, design is not a key factor. Design becomes a key factor when your product characteristics are similar, if not equal, with competitors. That's the main reason we are seeing a surge of design in web/UI lately: higher competition and lack of innovation.
This also reaffirms my theory that getting there first, when it comes to features, has much higher impact than long design phases (that can eventually be postponed).