My website is better than yours.
No, really, it is. Look at it.
It has no fancy CSS animations, has a really tiny amount of (not even required for any functionality) JavaScript, and still manages to look nice.
It uses a really nice looking font, but doesn’t care at all if the browser doesn’t support it. It’ll just fall back to a less-nice font. All the content will still be there.
I don’t need fancy scrolling when I click on section links. I don’t want fancy animations where my text bounces in from the sides of the screen (and gives me a headache). Even though I don’t have these things on my website, I still have links that go to sections, and do a good job at doing that.
I have a link that takes you back to the navigation section at the top of the page. If your browser supports position: fixed, then it’ll stay stickied to the bottom-right corner. Otherwise, it’ll just drop to the bottom. The only JavaScript on the page deals with hiding this link. If you’re already on the navigation section, and your browser supports JavaScript, then the link won’t show up. If you don’t run scripts, then the link will just be there all the time.
I use CSS3 flexbox functionality in order to present my thoughts and ideas clearly, and to keep a section-to-screenful correlation. Guess what happens if your browser doesn’t support flexbox? Nothing terrible, you’ll just see more content at once. It’s really no big deal.
There aren’t any images. The only resource that’s not text is the font I use. That means my page loads and displays really fast. The entire site is 81.4KB right now, and 76.8KB of that is the font, which isn’t even needed for correct display. It just looks nice.
What does that mean? It means my site will display on literally anything. I’m pretty sure you could get a potato with a screen and internet connection, and it will still display. Probably correctly.
It’s also completely valid HTML5. Same goes for the CSS. This site will display perfectly on anything that supports the HTML5/CSS3 standards, and on everything else, it will gracefully fall back.
This is what it looks like in elinks. This is what I mean when I say “gracefully fall back.” Even in environments with nothing other than text, the thing still displays all of the site’s content, and the site is still fully functional.
You want mobile support? I’ve got that too.
You want Internet Explorer 5 on Windows NT support? Yeah, I have that too.
Yep, that’s right. I’ve made a site with what a lot of people would call “responsive design” while making it work in elinks. And it’s fast, too.
And I did it without those terrible headache-inducing animations.
Can you say all of that about your website?
Probably not.
edit: Let me just clarify: I’m not trying to say that design is unimportant. Design is absolutely very important. What I’m trying to say is that websites need to be fast, and have some sort of fallback for that one person who’s still using IE6. That’s what a lot of the web is missing.