
The most minimalist commercial website you'll ever see - eykanal
http://www.biketek.com/
======
jellicle
I think that's a great commercial website, better than the majority of
commercial websites in existence today.

I would include several sentences about the business and a photo or two for
perfection.

"BikeTek sells and repairs all kinds of bicycles, with an emphasis on left-
handed 7-wheeled racing bicycles. We maintain an inventory of about 700
bicycles and can get anything you want in stock within a week."

I would also probably make it a minimally valid HTML page. But other than
that, perfect.

~~~
jtnt
Ha. Of course the first instinct is to start adding stuff to it.

------
heyrhett
Also, this is not bad, considering it's the 8th largest publicly traded
company in the world: <http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/>

~~~
jeromec
I think I heard something about Warren Buffet paying the eleven-year-old kid
of a relative to put up his site, seriously.

~~~
stevenj
If you have a source, I'd love to read that story.

~~~
jeromec
You know, I believe I read about that on HN long ago. Google is utterly
failing me for the lookup, though.

------
ctdonath
So close, and yet so far...

Easy enough to make it useful - and look exactly the same - by linking the
address to a map, the email to a sendto:, etc.

There's a fine line between "minimalist" and "inadequate". We're in 2011; I
expect a website be simple yet intuitively, if not proactively, functional.

~~~
eykanal
Why bother? I imagine that from their standpoint, a website is a glorified
business card. They're not trying to impress or sell you anything, but at the
same time they went to the trouble of posting virtually all the useful
information you could need. Yes, they could link to google maps, but your
business card doesn't do that, so why should their website?

If I (re)learned anything from this site, it's that "because it can" is a
crappy reason to add features. I'm sure this site serves them very well.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Because it's a website. If I expected a business card, I'd ask for a business
card. I go to the website because I expect it to give me relevant information.
If I go to the website and find that I have to go to Google to search for
directions or a map, you lose out on a lot. Number one, I'm no longer
primarily thinking about your establishment. Number two, my time is wasted.
Number three, as I'm searching Google, it recommends a closer bike shop.

It's a webpage, I don't see it unreasonable at all to expect or hope that it
has basic webpage features.

As a customer, I know that the effort to insert two <a href> tags is
microscopic compared to even a small number of customers having to do those
actions manually. And if that tiny bit of effort causes even one additional
conversion... it seems absolutely worth it. No?

~~~
sliverstorm
_They're not trying to impress or sell you anything_

You seem to have forgotten that part.

By the way, remember that this is a bicycle shop we're talking about. They
probably spend a lot more time thinking about bicycles than SEO or optimizing
click-through to visit ratios, and IMHO that's how it should be.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
A bike SHOP isn't trying to sell you anything? How long to they expect to stay
in "business?"

------
famousactress
Literally much better than every single restaurant website I've ever had the
displeasure of visiting.

~~~
jarin
Every time I go to a restaurant that's practically empty, I check the website
on my phone and it's always really bad (busy restaurants usually have at least
a decent site). The worst part is I often offer to do a redesign for a modest
price but they never see the value in it.

~~~
famousactress
I think it's an interesting issue. I'm not actually convinced that restaurants
even really need much of a website, honestly. The busy ones could probably do
fine without altogether.. so in some ways, the indifference isn't what
surprises me... What surprises me is the unbelievably awful 5,000-10,000$
flash monstrosities that make it basically impossible for me to figure out if
you've got egg salad.

For me the world is split first into things assist in, or get in the way of me
eating egg salad.

------
eykanal
It's got all the useful information you may want, with none of the cruft. I'm
either amazed or... actually, no, I'm just amazed.

~~~
petervandijck
ok I clearly have to clean mine up: <http://funkymonkeycorp.com/>

~~~
yeahsure
Hey buddy, you might want to check your code. Your index's source is filled
with drug-related spam links.

Edit: Oh, and by the way, I liked your site a lot better than the OP :-)

~~~
petervandijck
Ouch, fixed that and hopefully fixed the security breach.

Also simplified the site: <http://funkymonkeycorp.com/>

~~~
yeahsure
Much better now! Though I kinda liked the image :) Also, why not have the
company name in <h1>? Just an idea though.

------
stevenj
This reminded me of a pg quote:

“When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When
you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.”

<http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html>

------
heyrhett
relevant: <http://xkcd.com/773/>

------
mneu
Mobile friendly and everything.

~~~
sukuriant
This is a huge point. It really is. So many websites turn me off because
they're not mobile friendly when I want to read them. At least this one is. I
could go in and get exactly the information I needed, and without 400
redirects and page-reshapings for all the pictures that'd be displayed.

------
helipad
So this is what it feels like when I hear people discuss art.

One side claims it's genius with everything taken away lest only the most
pertinent information. Inserts a gobbit from Einstein on minimalism and
strokes his beard in awe.

The other: it's dumb.

------
pbreit
Has anyone ever done good research on how a minimalist web site might compare
to a fancier version with respect to the various objectives of the site owner?
Some other minimalist sites that perform quite well are Hacker News and
Craigslist. Have site owners been mis-led into thinking that flashiness
equates to credibility or customer satisfaction?

~~~
petervandijck
In terms of credibility, there is serious Stanford research that says that
"professional" looking sites increase credibility/trust.

------
michaelelliot
That's not minimalism, that's just lazy.

~~~
petervandijck
Nope, it's minimalism all right :)

------
biketek
Wow. The index page is just a placeholder while the content is completed for
the WordPress template I bought on ThemeForest. Frank @ Biketek

------
code_duck
Well, it made me want to go look up biketek on Google, so I could find some
information about who they are and what they do.

------
swah
So, what do they do?

~~~
bigiain
My gut feel is that they're probably one of those businesses who, if you don't
already know exactly what they do, you're not part of their target market.

This is _exactly_ the sort of website I'll suggest if, say, Stradivarius came
to me and said "I want a website for my violin building business".

If your demand so outstrips your supply that there's no way you need more
customers than you're already servicing, why would you need anything more than
this for a website?

------
swah
Lots of A/B testing went into this.

------
tgrass
I love it. Now if restaurants would follow suit.

And <br> is the only tag.

~~~
phlux
Actually much like the humans.txt file for sites -- all sites should have a
contact.txt file that is modeled after this and has one URL to their address
on gmaps.

so you could type into your browser: hardknoxcafe.com/contact.txt and get all
the info you needed.

minimal style.

~~~
reustle
Pretty soon, we'll need some sort of index to manage all of these text files
full of useful information. We can connect them together to make it easier to
navigate. Let's call these hyperlinks.

~~~
davidkatz
:)

------
catshirt
i don't know their audience but i imagine they're leaving opportunities on the
table. still, it's better than many commercial sites who try to do more.

------
hasenj
I would enlarge the font a bit, put more spacing between lines, and use a sans
font.

<http://jsfiddle.net/wkmhm/>

~~~
BasDirks
I would make the times more readable thus.

<http://jsfiddle.net/254EV/>

~~~
fedd
and add an a-href-mailto to the email address.

------
becomevocal
You're missing the point. Its awesomeness is in the fact they're hosting this
on an iPod Touch submerged in four gallons of pizza sauce.

~~~
jpanganiban
that'd be osm! I'll give it a try and keep you posted!

haha.

------
hammock
I like it a lot. But I have two changes.

1) fix the non-parallel use of "Thur" - use "Thu" instead or even "Thurs"

2) no need for the "email:" line - just put the email

------
smilliken
I hired the same designer for my personal website: <http://scottmilliken.com>

------
catch404
I hope that this style catches on - better than the blog templates most people
use. Being a bike store I would have thought they'd list brands and
specialities though.. It seems the site would only be useful if you know the
shop.

------
trafnar
I would link the email address, but other than that, it's nearly perfect. I
agree a description of what they do would be helpful.

I treat my website the same way: <http://nathanmanousos.com/>

------
leftnode
Already mobile optimized!

------
leeHS
I love it. Even the font.

~~~
hammock
The font is not specified....

------
brok3nmachine
I expect to find this information without having to leave google maps. Store
hours is the only reason I end up going to a website when I need contact
information, which I despise having to do.

------
imwilsonxu
Remove "email:" to make it more minimal :)

------
atuladhar
Isn't the email address highly vulnerable to harvesting for spamming purposes?

~~~
ugh
Who cares? Spam is more or less a solved problem. (Gmail!)

------
phlux
I like it - it should have a little styling though. Like a nice font.

It would also be cool if they had something that indicated really quickly what
they did... visually, maybe a picture of a bike, or the store or something.
Even better if the picture was animated like those other websites.

I like music too - maybe they could play stairway to heaven real loud as soon
as I got there. That would be sweet!

Maybe they could engage me better if they had the text do something... like
use the <blink> tag.

I tried to like this on facebook and share it on twitter after wanting to post
it to digg -- but the buttons dont seem to load for me.

~~~
billforsternz
Nice. I'd love to know what percentage of readers here realize you are joking.
Sheldon Cooperism is pretty rampant in these parts, so I am guessing less than
90%.

------
kahawe
What I really like about it is you can find their store hours right away;
countless shops here have that information very well hidden under unsuspecting
links like "about" ("Impressum" in German).

------
huhtenberg
Way too much white space at the top :P

