weird webpage structures!

[xixxii]

i have been thinking lately about general norms and "rules" about how websites are put together... while i would like my website to be fun and interesting i've been feeling pretty antsy and constrained lately, and have been trying to think of ways to structure a page that are more interesting, weird, unpleasant, and/or unintuitive. i figure it'd be a fun thing to chat about on here! the unusual shapes and structures are my favorite thing about melon's site.

pages and layouts and divs are generally squares and rectangles, scroll vertically, and things are usually centered or left-aligned. when making things work on mobile, the content is the same but the formatting is different. so... what if a webpage was totally different on mobile and on computer? what if a page was a cube or a navigation bar was a spiral or a div was a triangle? what if everything was horizontal instead of vertical? what if all websites had business hours and days off like this forum does? what if a website had a day/night cycle? or weather?? 

those are the ideas i've been pondering so far. there are so many things one can do with a website that people generally don't do for one reason or another - usually because it's ugly, impractical, annoying, or difficult to use! but that's kind of the appeal of having a personal website, the freedom to make useless crummy stuff because you're not beholden to anybody...

so! do you have any nonstandard pages on your site that you're proud of? are there any weirdly-structured webpages that you like? what are some shitty webpage structural concepts you've never seen before or some norms you've noticed websites tend to conform to? do you have any plans for anything like this, or ideas you want someone else to do? 

[WraithGlade]

Hey, coincidentally I remember seeing your awesome site earlier, the one with the falling UI elements that have to be picked back up! Very impressive work on that!   

Anyway, the first thoughts that came to my mind as a response to your thread here were:

• Simple sites (e.g. many static ones) could use the map HTML element to greatly diversify the interface.
• Advanced sites (e.g. many dynamically generated or heavily scripted ones) could use JavaScript and/or server-side programming to do pretty much whatever they arbitrarily want to.

Of course, given then high competence implied by your own site's dynamic content, you obviously don't need me to tell you that. Maybe others could benefit from the thought though (as above).

Personally, for my own site philosophy, I am big on performance, legibility, reliability, practical utility, and low-bandwidth users' accessibility and so I deliberately have imposed a restriction where I only ever use pure HTML and CSS for the site, and only legible forms of it, though I may eventually start generating it from code to reduce the tedium of maintenance. That unfortunately severely restricts what I can do, unlike people who permit themselves to use dynamically generated content etc.

However, I think dynamic websites can be really wonderful and fun and enjoy browsing many of them.

For some reason people sometimes take the existence of my site (and other minimalist/utilitarian sites) as a personal affront on their identities (etc), but they should understand that us minimalists/utilitarians are not generally trying to say you can't build a site any other way and shouldn't take it as a norm they "have to" adhere to.

I would say trust your heart and be creative! 

The web revival requires all kinds of people and a diverse variety of different roles and web philosophies.

Just like in the natural world, where species evolve to fill specific niches, the same is bound to happen in any decentralized and creatively/intellectually healthy web environment and that is (I think) what is for the best!

A healthy ecosystem requires variety and adaptation! 

[Zombiethederg]

Oooh yes!! I am a sucker for breaking out of the norm like this.. I may implement a Weather or Day/Night cycle to my website now that you've mentioned it akldsbhflaksbdjf

But my original website, before I made the changes to what might be seen as a more "normal" website, I think was a lot of fun. I made everything seem like a conversation between characters on web pages, and the whole place could be accessed through a big table that was modeled after a town (think of Melonkings Melon Town sitemap! I in fact stole the code from that to make it lol)

I think there are plenty of fun ideas to be had with abnormal pages.. some that come to mind are a website that fit in a "book" the reader has to flip through in order to gain access to certain pages. A 3D modeled game loadable in the browser that allows the player to physically walk through a website town, and talk with residents you place within it. Or even a map where you have to plot a course on a boat in order to get to different islands that have different web pages on them!

There are alot of possibilities!!

[varve]

I just discovered the shape-outside css property, and I think I would like to explore that a bit more - it lets you have floated things which are not rectangles, that text can flow around and follow whatever curve or shape you like. So that's one thing for getting away from the boxy layout constraints! (I think it only applies to floats though, since floats are what text flows around in the normal course of things.)

I used it to put the circular "sticker" on the 32-bit café code jam page I made.