what is a website anyway?

My only other experiences building a website has been playing around on Weebly or even Wix in middle school, trying to make whatever project I was working on look like the “professional websites” I had seen. Those were incredibly static platforms; you’re locked into what objects you can put where and how each page will look, it robs you of taking full creative liberties with your site.

Being able to build a website brings life into a seemingly stagnant page. What may look like a basic home page is actually chock full of tedious code to be able to bring it to life. And life is truly what it is.

Reading these authors talk about websites being an interactive place that will outlive us all breathes life into this basic code. Just like any other work of art, an artist’s soul lies within the website, their style and their flourishes as present on screen as it would be on a canvas.

Websites function as an extension of its architect. They become this online space where a part of that artist’s soul lives. This all sounds almost too poetic to be describing lines of HTML and CSS, but if you take a step back and look at what a website is, I’m not being that dramatic.

The first day of class when we built the most rudimentary website, I felt a whole world unlock for me. Going through J.R. Carpenter’s book that would start over again and again and again is when I realized just how much work and effort and art go into making a website.

I used to think it was just people sitting behind a computer, plugging away at random lines of code and all of a sudden this beautiful and interactive website just sprung to life. Yeah, it gets a bit technical going through each line of code, but it still is an artform, and an underrated one at that.

Schwulst goes on to talk about how social media companies have their main focus on advertisements and user engagement and less on keeping the user’s best interests at heart. As much as I continuously engage with platforms such as Instagram or TikTok, it becomes more and more evident that the algorithm is not working for me but rather for whatever these platforms want to push out. It’s a never-ending stream of advertisements that takes away from the beauty that is a platform that learns from you and curates a feed for you. That’s where I feel websites like that lose their charm and lose their relatability. Their main focus is profit and the users are just numbers to them.

That’s what’s so different about being able to create your own website; you are able to cater exactly to what you want and what other users may want. The website you make is wholeheartedly and undoubtedly you,

and isn't that just beautiful?

-mk