Dude, What's with the Lack of Knowledge

I've been in the Web business for over a decade.

The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely not part of the first 200 sites to go live on the Web. Search engines then did not have the analytics results to prove this because that's all there was. Yeah. They've been around for a bit. They just weren't the first site with a background color other than gray.

During that time, I've learned a few things. One of them is that probably half of Heavy Cat's competition soared to amazing heights by building "cool" Web sites to market their products. The reason is pretty simple. HTML is designed to present text and the occasional image. When you spend money and time to try to make it do more than that: innovation is born.

CSS is not intuitive. The only reason most people don't complain more about it is because they learn to use it. HTML is not intuitive either, but at least it's easy to learn once you realize there's a Box Object Model. JavaScript is very useful, and also pretty amazing. You can spend days, weeks and months cramming them together in new and innovative ways and ultimately you'll end up with a lot of well spent time and a site made of unique functionality and the occasional video.

You know those sites with the long lists of really amazing-looking Web designs? Funny how all those links go to prosperous sites with a link trying to sell you the products they've created.

DOS was the same way. It was a simple, quick shell and file system for PCs. It took a couple of stone cold geniuses years to make the DOOM engine. Why? DOS wasn't designed for that. Which is why they made it in C with their own graphics library and only hooked into the system APIs they needed. All the DOOM engine parts had to be invented from scratch.

I have decided after over a decade that I'm tired of trying to make bad developers understand the abilities of the Web. HTML is amazing and full of possibilities. It can be molded like clay into beautiful creations. That's it.

Here's a pro-tip from a seasoned veteran of Web development: if you're going to write an article flaming Web technologies, learn to capitalize Web and JavaScript correctly. And, more seriously, never use markup as a high level imperative language.

Now I do get some benefits from doing Web sites this way. One, it's simple and easy to update with the advent of modern technologies like content management systems. Two, it's not cluttered with distractions like all the incoherent blog articles. Three, they load ultra fast when you keep scalability in mind. Why look at that! We've solved all the problems most "shitty" Web sites have, at a portion of the profit they generate!

Think about all the most popular, successful Web sites. Google. Craigslist possibly, YouTube -- I mean Google. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Mountains of servers, load balancers, support staff, etc. to preserve up time and availability. There's animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, sound in general, gimmicks like games and apps, gizmos like Google's widgets or gew-gaws (whatever that may be). They are all complex and functional, and those six Web sites -- well more like four -- together represent about <a non-verified, completely shot from the hip> dollar amount value.

Simplistic and forgotten. That's what Heavy Cat's site is going to be. They have a lot of information, if you can consider seven main pages to be "a lot". They have a choice. They can spend six months building a gee-whiz site, or they can build more marginally profitable products. They chose the products.

They use Flash too, as a final insult. You know why they use Flash? Because it's the only thing they learned how to use. The tools integrate well into their established workflow and they interoperate well with all the tools designed by the exact same software firm (somehow). They allow them to make graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good. As they should, with the monthly subscription costs.

Someday Heavy Cat might use HTML5 too. But Flash had a 16-year death, so they're going to use what doesn't work with the majority of the world. If you are on an Apple phone, or just don't want to run Flash, their site will look even shittier. If you want to look at their Flash stuff, bend to their will.

They also no longer care about SEO, so you won't see their Web pages on any search engines much. Searching for anything but "Heavy Cat" directly yields no results referencing their site.

Matt