My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

by Laurel Schwulst

"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."

"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."

"How could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating? How can you make it fun or thought-provoking or (insert desired feeling here) for you? How can the process of making and cultivating a website contribute to your approach?"

"A website can be anything."

"It doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) be an archive of your complete works. That’s going to be dead the moment you publish. A website, or anything interactive, is inherently unfinished. It’s imperfect—maybe sometimes it even has a few bugs. But that’s the beauty of it. Websites are living, temporal spaces. What happens to websites after death, anyway?"

"Plants can’t be rushed. They grow on their own. Your website can be the same way, as long as you pick the right soil, water it (but not too much), and provide adequate sunlight. Plant an idea seed one day and let it gradually grow."

"Maybe it will flower after a couple of years. Maybe the next year it’ll bear fruit, if you’re lucky."

"You might spend the less active months journaling in your notebook: less output, more stirring around on input. You need both. Plants remind us that life is about balance."

"Sometimes you don’t want a website that you’ll have to maintain. You have other things to do. Why not consider your website a beautiful rock with a unique shape which you spent hours finding, only to throw it into the water until it hits the ocean floor? You will never know when it hits the floor, and you won’t care.""

"“Metaphor unites reason and imagination,” says George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book, Metaphors We Live By (1980). “Metaphors are not merely things to be seen beyond. In fact, one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors. It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world. Metaphor is as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious.”"

"In an age of information overload and an increasingly commercialized web, artists of all types are the people to help. Artists can think expansively about what a website can be. Each artist should create their own space on the web, for a website is an individual act of collective ambition."