w is for website
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. — laurel schwulst, My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
a website is a link to a page in an infinite book bound within one domain name. it’s where the architecture of the internet becomes apparent to many of us. it’s a landing — like a stoop, porch, or front door. peering through the window, what do you want us to learn about you? who else are you connected to?
i remember how special it once felt to create something on the web, not knowing who would stumble upon it. i felt a great deal of responsibility to create a space that was an extension of myself. i put a lot of care into curating what would become the homepage to greet browsers before they stepped inside to the interior pages. each line of code was a brick, a wall, a window, for a home on the terrain that is the internet.
i am inspired by this generation of us who want to return home. we hold a sliver of the internet that invited us to experiment and tinker without a degree in programming. websites were quirky, nerdy, and off-center. since then new sites have been erected, and similar to our physical world, monied developers have come in to erect new shiny sites for us to occupy or give us choice from a limited selection (social media platforms and website generators).
and also like our physical world, some of the old places we used to hang out no longer exist with the removal of domains from the internet. just like that it’s gone, only to be held in memory or preserved with the help of the internet archive’s wayback machine — frozen in time.
we’ve exchanged what was playful, soft, weird, and fun about websites for sleekness, symmetry, perfection.
what are ways we can link to each other in this current moment?
how do we build spaces of refuge on the web?
a website is a home. some of my favorite sources of inspiration for how to architect for the soft, poetic, web come from naive weekly, i like to stop by tiger dingsun’s site, or a recent fave is https://smallweb.site/. i’m slowly building my own home at citation.studio site.
see: domain name, window
© 2025 New Terms & Conditions