I spend a few hours a day, every day talking to prospects. Without fail, most of them launch off into a "let me tell you about my last experience" story and it's just so depressing to hear; from flat out scammed, to "it took them 10 months to put up our 5 page site" to "we paid 10K for a custom site and turns out it's just an out of the box theme" to "support disappeared as soon as it launched." The bottom line is I don't spend most of my initial conversation about what they need and what my agency can do for them, I spend it building trust. And I can tell you this much, even with our references and all the client's sites we've built over the years, none of that matters to them. It's such a shame as soon as you say "web design" to potential clients the word think that comes to their mind is "scam."

I see that website that filled with illustrations are pretty rare. Do you guys know heavily illustrated website that I can use for reference?

Thank you!

people clock sites as "vibe coded" in like 2 seconds now. sometimes i see it too but i cant really explain what im reacting to

so: drop links. sites you think are ai made, sites you think definitly arent. both ideally so theres smth to compare

if you can say why you flagged it thats cool but "idk just looks like it" works too, im curious how much of this is actually legible vs pure vibes

also does it even matter? if the page converts, does looking ai-ish cost you anything besides taste points from other devs

So when it comes to the collections section of my website each page has a different way of listing everything, and the movies page is the only one you can click on to get more details. I'd really like to have a standard kind of layout or flow instead of jumping around. Especially for the movies page as it takes so long to load all the images and just feels clunky to me.

https://rwkraemer.com/Collections

I think a lot of web design prospecting tools start with the wrong assumption. They find a business with an old website, identify everything wrong with it, and treat that as proof the owner is a good lead. But the owner may already have all the work they want. They may live entirely on referrals. They may have no interest in growing. They may have received the same website audit pitch five times this month.

I have had better luck looking for signs that the business is active and trying to understand what they are actually working toward. Are they promoting a new service? Are they hiring? Are they posting regularly but have nowhere useful to send that attention? Are they trying to expand into another area?

Then the first message can be a normal question about that instead of immediately telling them their website is bad. I am building this approach into a prospecting tool I use for my own web design outreach, but I am curious how other designers choose who is actually worth contacting. Do you mainly look for obvious website problems, or signs that the business may genuinely want to grow?

How are you using Framer or other drag and drop platforms? Are you using them & honestly where does the mark hit and miss entirely?

I have been playing around with building free framer templates for example my link in bio tool: https://www.framer.com/community/marketplace/templates/link-in-bio-tool/

And honestly from a creative/marketing angle it is so much more intuitive that most dev platforms?

Opinions on framer, developing within it and how we think the web dev world will change this next few years due to these types of platforms?

Backend dev, zero frontend/design sense. Vibe-coded my frontend and it's giving classic "another AI weekend project" vibes, I genuinely can't tell good UI from bad.

Are there any prompts, tools, design resources, or workflows you use to make AI-generated UIs look more premium and less obviously AI-made? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

I have been checking out many projects people have been posting in this sub and rest and one thing I immediately notice is all their website look very similar, I think at one point you can't even distinguish between different product's website.

Not sure whether everyone uses some template or it's just what every model create

Edit - I'm just talking over the website design, I'm not talking about the overall product, I have seen some genuinely good ideas here

I can do html css bootstrap but I really don't understand how to put it to make it look nice. I have seen multiple sites but in my brain nothing is getting formed from a design idea perspective. Also if they did then I'm not able to make it. What should I do? Any suggestions. Please.

Thank you!

Was going down a rabbit hole on form validation and found a stat that annoyed me: only about 2% of ecommerce sites bother to tell you what you got wrong. john@gmail and john.gmailcom both just get "please enter a valid email." The code clearly knows the difference, it just doesn't say.

Turns out that's not only lazy UX anymore, it's a compliance thing in the EU now. The Accessibility Act ties into WCAG 2.1 AA and there are rules that errors have to actually be spelled out in text and say how to fix them.

A French court hit Carrefour with a €500/day penalty over their checkout.

The "funny" part is it's getting worse. The libraries everyone uses for this stuff (SweetAlert2, Select2, jQuery UI) apparently correlate with the worst accessibility scores.

Anyone actually dealing with this at work or is everyone just ignoring it until someone complains?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, web designer and developer employment will grow 13% from 2020 to 2030. Simultaneously, from 2018 to 2028, the global web design services market is estimated to expand at a compound rate of 10.8%. With that being said, the median wage for web designers is also expected to rise in the foreseeable future.

Is the text above a reality in your lives as freelance web designers? Is that market growing?

Our web component library is used by our clients to build search interfaces. Those interfaces need to meet accessibility requirements, so our components do too.

We turned our Accessibility Conformance Report, based on the VPAT, into a build artifact: automated tests run in CI, manual audit results are reviewed alongside the code, and the assembled report is published with each release.

• Static checks via axe-core
  
• Interactive keyboard checks via Vitest
  
• Human audits for subjective criteria (like screen reader flow)

This keeps the report aligned with the product and means we no longer have to rely on external agencies to assess our conformance and produce it.

The post covers the pipeline, where automation stops, and the AI-based approach we tried (and ultimately abandoned).

Fastest way possible

We're an enterprise AI engineering company doing agentic AI work. Custom AI agents, multi-agent orchestration, enterprise RAG platforms, document intelligence, legal and contract AI, workflow automation, and we run all of it in production for clients, not just build and hand over. We work with both commercial and open-source models (including NVIDIA Cosmos for domain-specific stuff) and deploy secure, on-prem or hybrid depending on the client. Our website says none of that. Stock icons, walls of text, looks like we make mobile apps. Manager finally agreed it needs a relook and now it's on me.

Current plan is dark theme, an animated diagram of how an agent actually works instead of icons, short claims and numbers instead of paragraphs. But is the dark mode purple gradient thing too played out now? And any B2B AI sites you've seen that actually impressed you? Please give your ideas and suggestions, would really help. Happy to drop our current site in comments for a proper roast.

Every so often I go through agency portfolios to see how other teams approach product design, responsive layouts, and design systems. Some agencies mainly showcase polished visuals, while others explain the thinking behind the project, which I usually find more useful.

A few that I've looked through recently include GeekyAnts, Clay, and Ramotion. They all seem to have different styles and priorities.

I'm curious which agencies you keep coming back to for inspiration not because they're the biggest, but because their work teaches you something new each time.

I just came across the difference between Server-level stateless and system-level stateless. If the server stores data of previous interactions and use that data to determine how to process future interaction, then the server is stateful. But if the server relies on an external storage system such as a database, then the server is stateless because it does not store session data, however, the system is stateful because the backend system still relies on session data of previous interactions to determine how to process future interactions.

Now, lets say you use a JWT token for authentication and authorization and you don't store session data in the backend system for example in the server or an external storage system like a database. The state only exists in the token being sent by the client. This is definitely a stateless server but would this still be considered a stateless system because we do not store anything in the backend? Or is still considered a stateful system because the interaction still relies on session data from previous interaction to determine how to process future interaction.

I remember seeing it on X, just a simple site that had a gallery of various frontends made by various LLMs with the same prompt. So one can compare their design skills. Does anybody know which site it is?

Anyone know of any beautiful e-commerce sites?

I've been seeing more designers creating prototypes with AI instead of static mockups. Has this changed your workflow, or do you still prefer traditional design handoffs?

I have tried Claude Design, Google Stitch and basic image generation with providing design assessments and points for improvements. I have been on and off at it for the past few months. Using a design system in Claude Design was attempted as well, but that is quite off limits for me due to the high token consumption. I tried out Figma Make as well with directly pointing to said screen but that turned into a slop. I cannot figure what the scope is of Figma Make given Google Stitch exists and its friendly token wise. I am at a loss on what to do next - it might not even be possible at the current AI stage, or so costly it might not be worth it for me. I would very much appreciate your thoughts on this! (also help me out of this hell loop pls)

My expectation was to be able to generate various different layout re-organisations (high quality) derived from the assessments, but I only got horrific AI slops. I did not provide the design solution per se (as in place this horizontally or vertically, transform this calendar view into another calendar view) but rather expected it to be thought of by the AI in order to meet an end goal (improve hierarchy, catch user's attention etc. - whatever can be derived from said assessments).

Any way to reiterate fast on existent designs and generate variations within strictly defined bounds (so keeping the design system) with derived solutions (the improvements in the current scenario)?

Any suggestion is much appreciated!