This website currently satisfies two of my biggest needs:
- having a centralized place in which to store all my notes about any subject;
- finding useful websites without any bloat, ads or spyware.
The first point is the reason why I started working on freestingo.com, while the second point is the reason it looks like this. I wanted to create an easily readable, browsable and accessible website both for fast and slow devices, so this stripped-down layout quickly became the most logical solution. I am not unlike the vast majority of netizens in hating popup windows and auto-playing videos, but I feel like the pushback on the ever-present full-screen pictures and huge title texts is still not big enough. The unwritten rule of (western) contemporary web design seems to be: the bigger a component is, the better the user experience will be. In my experience, I’ve always found the opposite to be true. Very low information density can look “minimal” or “trendy”, but it also adds unnecessary friction to the usability of the website. Do I really have to scroll two screenfuls down before I can start reading an article? Do I really have to download a 1MB script for animating 3D abstract colorful blobs floating around in the background? In my opinion, forcing people to wait for all these graphics to load before entering your site is a WAY worse user experience than just having them look at Times New Roman :-)
The more you look into it, really, and the more you realize the only reason most websites are so unnecessarily bloated is that “everybody else does it”. This is also the main reason why nowadays popups are so casual about asking you permission for accesssing all of your personal data. Having no devices that gather, process and send your intimate and personal data out to third parties for profit without our explicit consent has become virtually impossible. Advertisers have done an excellent job on normalizing this kind of practice, so much so that trying to develop a digital service that only does what it says on the tin without silently plundering its users’ privacy would be considered sheer madness (or at the very least, a bad business plan) by literally everyone in the market right now. This is why websites have access to your entire browsing history, smartphones are continuously documenting (amongst many other things) the exact position, speed and height of your every step, operating systems are logging your every keystroke, refrigerators now come with a companion app that must be installed on your smartphone and must have access to your contacts, smart watches have sensors capable of monitoring your biometric data, bluetooth speakers' microphones are always on, robot vacuums carefully scan every square centimeter of your apartment and must be connected to the wifi router at all times… these are just a few examples I can think of right now. Very few people actively choose not to buy any of these devices. Shortly there won’t even be a choice anymore — markets are rushing to discover new ways to smartify everything and contribute to the ever-growing mountain of behavioural data. I argue that our everyday life does not and should not have to be like this: freestingo.com does not use cookies, does not spy on your online private activities and never will because it does not contain any javascript code; all pages in here are static and just made of simple HTML and CSS.
Appendix: what is a “freestingo”?
The fristingo is a traditional sweet dish made from figs, nuts and grape must. Families usually bake it and serve it to their children’s delight during Christmas time in the Marche region of Italy. It’s very tasty and yet relatively not that well known anywhere else — a great, fool-proof recipe for whenever I need to impress someone or just need a unique moniker nobody else has ever used before.