I doubt very much that anybody can launch a website / web-app today with only user-agent stylesheets and be successful. Even for an internal product that would be seen as bad/lazy/unoptimal.
Although there are also a fair number of academics who invest more effort in web design than I do, this type of design is fairly common in math. I haven't heard anyone within the field criticize it as "bad" or "lazy".
My students are part of the audience, but not all.
For example, if I give a talk at a conference, then someone who was in the audience might plausibly look up my website to get a sense of my research interests.
For some reason I have always seen academic websites like yours as a different concept. Most academic websites look like yours and I think that’s fine.
I was thinking more of something like a CMS control panel or some data-entry tool, or a consumer website like an e-commerce.
> I doubt very much that anybody can launch a website / web-app today with only user-agent stylesheets and be successful. Even for an internal product that would be seen as bad/lazy/unoptimal.
