It Looks Like a Homework Assignment

Narrated

Your trip planner works. It takes a destination, calls an AI, and spits out a day-by-day itinerary. The code is backed up on GitHub. Your secrets are safe in a “.env” file. Technically, everything is solid.

But show it to someone. Watch their face.

They’ll see a plain white page. Tiny default font. A text box and a button that look like they were dragged out of a Windows 98 dialog. No spacing. No hierarchy. No indication that this is a serious tool that someone should trust with their vacation planning.

First impressions are brutal. Research shows that people form an opinion about a website in about fifty milliseconds — that’s faster than a blink. And that opinion is almost entirely based on how it looks, not what it does. If it looks amateur, people assume the product is amateur. If it looks polished, people assume it works well, even before they try it.

This isn’t vanity. This is survival. Your trip planner could be the smartest AI application in the world, but if it looks like a homework assignment, nobody will give it a chance.

There’s also a legal dimension that most beginners don’t know about. In the European Union and the United States, websites are increasingly required to be accessible to people with disabilities. That means good contrast so people with low vision can read it, keyboard navigation so people who can’t use a mouse can still interact, and proper labels so screen readers can describe the page to people who are blind. This isn’t optional — it’s law in many jurisdictions, and it’s just good practice everywhere.

Today we fix all of this at once.