This is a jolly nice website...

Seriously, what else do you want?

You probably build websites and think your creation is special. You think your 13 megabyte paralax-ative home page is going to get you a spiffing award banner you can glue to the top corner of your site. You think your 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a bit of a lift because it finally has box-shadow. Wrong, silly person. Let me describe to you a perfect website:

• It's lightweight and loads fast
• Fits on all your different screens
• Looks the same in all your odd browsers
• The whole thing is accessible to every lovley person that visits your site
• Everything is legible and gets your point across (if you had one instead of just 5mb pics of hipsters drinking coffee)

Well guess what:

You actually might just be over-designing it a little bit. Look at this page. It's an actual website. Why on earth do you need to animate an on trend banner flag when I hover over less than optimal bits? You spent hours on it and added 80 kilobytes to your good effort site, and some cultured commuter jabbing at it on their iPad with fingers will never see that where uyou have put additional time and effort into it. Not to mention the less than optically perfect visitors who will miss out on your enthusiastic but somewhat misunderstood efforts.

You never knew it, but this is your perfect website. Here's why.

It's rather lightweight

This entire page weighs less than the gradient-meshed facebook logo on your easy to install but a bit of a pudding to customise Wordpress site. Did you seriously load 100kb of jQuery UI just so you could animate that nice looking background color of a div? You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a webfont just so you could say "Hi." at 100px height at the beginning of your site?

It's responsive

Oh dear. You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no. Responsive means that it responds to whatever screensize it's viewed on. This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a Tamagotchi.

It just works

Look at this page. You can read it ... that is, if you have been through enough schooling to enable you to read. It makes sense. It has hierarchy. It's using HTML5 tags so you and your browser of choice know what is on this web site. That's semantics, mother botherer.

It has content on the screen, which is nice. Your site has three bylines and link to your dribbble account, but you spread it over 7 full screens and make me click some bobbing button to show me how cool the jQuery ScrollTo plugin is.

Cross-browser compatibility? Load this lot in IE6. I dare you.

This is a website. Look at it. You've never seen one before.

Like the silly fopp who's never grown out his beard has no idea what his true natural state is, you have not a clue what a website is. All you have ever seen are some skeuomorphic dramatisations of what should be text communicating a message. This is a real, naked website. Look at it. It's rather cute.

Yes, this is satire, so there.

I'm not actually saying your site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You there - yes you..

"Good design is as little design as possible."
- some German boffin.