Website complexity

[garyjohnson]

Hello, this is just a general question. I always look at every website source when I visit it and I notice they are very robust and complex. Then I look at my site and think wow, mine is nothing like that. Is there an issue with that? Am I not taking the correct procidures to develop my website? It looks the same in every browser and behaves how I want it to. To my knowledge it seems to accomplish what I want, but its not complex at all. Bassically I am just curious if I am missing something.

[AleMonteiro]

If it does what it should do, then it's OK. Complexity doesn't mean quality.

Complex codes could be a result of one(or a combination) of various cases:

• Too much and too complex functionalities
• Security reasons (complex code are more dificult to analyse, copy and break)
• Performance reasons (to get the best performance sometimes complexity is needed)
• Bad programmer that doesn't know what he/she is doing
• Good programmer that just wanted to make anyone who uses 'view source' confuse

[JorgeM]

In IT in general, you always want to design for simplicity. You only introduce complexity into the design when the complexity provides additional benefit outside and that benefit lowers cost and risk.

With regard to web pages, Like AleMonterio pointed out in his items, more doesnt always mean better. There are quite a bit of developers out there thay may be using IDEs to generate code and cause the code to be bloated.

[<M/>]

Well, not every site is like that. As AleMonteiro has said, complexity doesn't mean quality.

It is more preffered to have sites that have very simple index pages though.

@garyjohnson

Hello, this is just a general question. I always look at every website source when I visit it and I notice they are very robust and complex. Then I look at my site and think wow, mine is nothing like that. Is there an issue with that? Am I not taking the correct procidures to develop my website? It looks the same in every browser and behaves how I want it to. To my knowledge it seems to accomplish what I want, but its not complex at all. Bassically I am just curious if I am missing something.

I think I understand where your coming from. If you start using platforms like CMS (Wordpress, Drupal and etc) or PHP Framework (Yii, CodeIgniter and etc) you will start to see whether this website or other websites is using those platform to make the website function. You will start to notice certain code from those CMS/PHP Frameworks. It takes time to try those CMS/PHP Framework to remember or recognize codes. I'm still learning those CMS/PHP Framework codes. It's not that complex. So don't get discourage.