Chimaera: What is a Web Site?

Authored by John Pastore, Scott Lewis & George Flanagin

A website is like the Chimaera of Greek Mythology - an ugly, fearsome beast with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent. Websites today conjure an image of being made from three distinct other animals - print media, broadcast media and traditional software. Websites are often just as ugly and fearsome and embody the confusing conflict represented by the Chimaera.

What is a website? To build a usable website, we must know the answer. It is difficult to define precisely what a website is however, because as an entity, “website” was never required to have a precise meaning. The meaning has evolved, and it continues to evolve organically.

Webster’s defines a website as: “a group of World Wide Web pages usually containing hyperlinks to each other and made available online by an individual, company, educational institution, government, or organization.” This seems a bit like defining a bar stool as a collection of wood, metal, or other materials made available by a bar or restaurant. This definition does not help the proprietor, the furniture builder nor the user of the bar stool.

We lack a definition that incorporates the function and purpose of a website. Why does an individual or an organization make this collection of pages available to the World Wide Web? The de facto technical definition does not mention the purpose or the function of a website, the way we might say that the bar stool is provided so that patrons of the bar can sit, be comfortable, and spend more time and more money in the bar. A website is the representation of the desires of four different groups: the proprietor or site owner, the designers, the implemeters and the users or site visitors. The owner of the site thinks of a website as a representation of their organization (or self, if the site is about an individual), generally intended to advertise or market the organization. Designers see websites as an extension of the print and broadcast media. Developers tend to see websites as purely technical expressions of various programming languages.

What of the visitor to the site? In the views presented in the previous paragraph, the visitor is an extension, such as the owner’s view that advertising is aimed at the visitor, or the designer’s view of the site being appealing to the viewer, or the developer’s view that the visitor represents a set of other technologies that the site needs to be able to handle (the browser, for example).

The invention of the Internet cannot be attributed to a single entity. The conglomerate technologies are the inventions of several key players, each of whose innovations enable some aspect of the system. In the same way, the WWW arose through the convergence of a series of unrelated technologies, and there was no central plan or vision.

When television was first invented, it was treated like radio with pictures until the prime time drama began using images as much as dialog to tell a story. In a similar way, the WWW is overcoming explicit and implicit comparisons with print and broadcast media. Some of these comparisons are valid but the WWW has capabilities that older media lack: it is fundamentally interactive and based on pull (demand) rather than push (supply). The WWW is also diverse. Cable or satellite television may offer the viewer more than 500 channels; the WWW provides hundreds of millions of choices of websites and it is growing every day.

The radically different perceptions owners, designers and developers have of websites, create a confusing conflict for the site user. Owners treat websites as if they are traditional advertising and marketing. Designers treat websites as existing forms of communication - like print and broadcast media. Developers treat websites as just another computer GUI to be dealt with. While we can describe a website as being a collection of these things, we have yet to define a unique thing. We lack a definition that is focused on function, rather than parts and technology.

Perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words, and we seek words for our definition that include function, purpose, creation and use. The diagram below represents the parties concerned, their areas of ownership, and most importantly their interactions.

The diagram:

The above drawing is our attempt to represent the components of a website, and their interactions in an abstract way. Like all abstractions, it has been achieved by leaving out details in the interests of clarity and symmetry.

The participants:

The four points of the axes, proprietors, implementers, users and designers, represent the four classes of participants in a website. They are arranged in the way you see because the groups on opposite ends of the axis are least aware of each other. The reader should also note that many traditional software systems do not have “users” in the meaning that we assert in relation to websites; the users of many software systems are frequently the proprietors, and this makes website construction very different from the construction of other software systems.

To clarify, a proprietor is someone who pays for the website. The proprietor owns the purpose, at least in the sense that without the proprietor the website would never be built. The decision to have a website is rooted in the purpose, whether that purpose is ego gratification or an attempt to reach an online community of subscribers.

A user is what the proprietor would characterize as a customer or potential customer, and the person that the traditional website statistics would treat as a “site visitor.” Even if the user does not participate in defining the functions provided by the website, the user owns the functions because he alone will make the decisions about whether or not to use the site, and thus a decision about whether or not the functions are sufficient to meet his needs.

An implementer is what many people would call a programmer. In a more general sense of the word, an implementer is the person who creates the operational part of the website. With the advent of templates to assist in the construction of a website, it is possible to have a limited website without programming. However, this article is really only concerned with sites of sufficient functionality to require one or more programmers.

In the world of websites a designer is often a “graphic designer,” for as we have noted earlier in the article, websites are modeled to look like other, more familiar, things. The designers own the presentation of the website; they are responsible for what everyone sees: the users, the implementers, and the proprietors.

The interactions:

The four ellipses represent areas of interaction, most easily understood by who is left out. For example, the users are seldom aware of the budget, and even more rarely do they care about the costs. The proprietors cannot control the requirements, although many proprietors incorrectly attempt to negotiate them while the website is in a pre-production state. The programmers should not worry about the atmospherics, for they are not experts in branding. The designers should not stress out over database integrity or the programming languages used to make their ideas a reality.

Usability, the bottom line:

Usability is the common ground. Each party will share in the defeat if the site is not usable. In earlier times we did not concern ourselves too much about usability for several reasons. In addition to reasons that may be clear from reading the preceding paragraphs, there are others.

In the past, there were fewer choices about atmospherics. The green painted screens of IBM mainframe days certainly left no doubt about the methods used to create the underlying software. The flexibility in the atmospherics has not been a uniform gain for the users; it has actually led to a tremendous increase in unusable sites, rather than increasingly high standards of usability.

Computer software was once largely a collection of “systems for experts.” This has changed, and websites have much in common with “expert systems.” Websites are now general purpose, publicly distributed, searchable, mass customized for user preferences, and with an extensive ability to guide the user through unfamiliar territory. These were never issues until the past decade.

The above deconstruction is complete. We can now ask again, “What is a website?” One reasonable definition is something like this:

A website is a [1] collection of pages at a known location in cyberspace [2] that are designed in a way to create a recognizable set of atmospherics [3] to meet the functional needs of users who are attracted to the [4] proprietor’s purpose.

So why should anyone care about properly defining what a website is? Having a common, function-based definition of a website has many advantages. Websites are here to stay and their importance in business and society is increasing every day and will continue to do so. Websites are not the economic force predicted in the 1990’s, however, billions of dollars worth of business are conducted via the web every year. The 2004 Presidential Campaign showed the importance of the web and candidate websites in the electoral process. The rise of blogs and bloggers is changing the nature of journalism. Non-profit organization use the web and their websites effectively for fund raising and issue awareness.

In 2004, connection to the internet via broadband surpassed 50% in the United States. As the means of access and network speeds improve, the use and functionality of the web and websites will increase. The use of cell phones and other hand-held devices to access the web is increasing, making the web as a communication tool more ubiquitous every day and more integral to daily life.

A common definition of what a website is promotes a common language in talking about a website. This common language between owners, designers, and developers means less misunderstandings during the creation process for the site. This lowers the overall cost of initial creation.

Function-centered goals and compliance to accepted standards for a website make it easier to maintain over time, thus lowering the maintenance cost. When the site built by the developers is based on the functional goals of site owners and designers, a proper architecture for the technology can be achieved. When designers understand the requirements and limitations of the technology, and the degree of anticipated changes to the site, they can more readily and easily design for compatibility with the technology and rate of change. When the owner understands the purpose of a website - “providing a seat” - they can better understand, predict and monitor costs.