For the past handful of years, I've been teaching courses about interactive design and the internet.
I teach within art departments at universities, so we learn about the internet's impact on art—and vice
versa—and how technological advance often coincides with artistic development.
In class, we make websites. To do this, we learn the elemental markup and code
languages of the web—HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript.
This sparked my own questioning. “What is a website, anyway?” It's easy to forget.
Today there are millions of ways to make a website, and the abundance is daunting.
But at its core, a website is still the same as ever before:
A website is a file or bundle of files living on a server somewhere. A server is a
computer that's always connected to the internet, so that when someone types your
RL in, the server will offer up your website. Usually you have to pay for a server.
You also have to pay for a domain name, which is an understandable piece of language
that points to an IP. An IP is a string of numbers that is an address to your server.
Links (rendered default blue and underlined—they're the hypertext “HT” in HTML)
are the oxygen of the web. Not all websites have links, but all links connect to
other webpages, within the same site or elsewhere.
But my students already know this! So when they ask me about actually making a
website, they are referring to a website in the world … today.
It's healthy to acknowledge today's web is much different than the web many of
us grew up using. So when they ask how to make a website (despite having already
“learned”), they are alluding to the technological friction and social pressures
that often come along with creating and maintaining a website in 2018.
Although they may seem initially accommodating and convenient to their users,
universally popular social media sites—like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and
Pinterest—are private companies that prioritize advertising above their users
needs. Their users' happiness is not the primary focus, so it's perfectly normal
for you to feel anxiety when using or even thinking about social media. In this
age of digital cacophony dominated by these platforms, no one is looking out
for you… but you. It makes perfect sense, then, when individuals tell me they
want their website to do the job of “setting the record straight” on who they
are and what they do.
However, clarity is one of many possible intentions for a website. There are other
legitimate states of mind capable of communication—a surprising, memorable,
monumental, soothing, shocking, unpredictable, radically boring, bizarre, mind-blowing,
very quiet and subtle, and/or amazing website could work. You also need not limit
yourself to only one website—as perhaps you'd like to confuse or surprise with
multiple.
My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they're both subject and object at
once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously.
There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is
a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle?
Whatever it is, there's potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put
energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.