What are you looking at? Are you looking at ME?
Of course you are. Well not me, the writer behind this rambling, but you are looking at me, the website. The “me” in this case are the letters “m” and “e” and every other letter and thing you see on the display in front of your face. These things all “live” here, on a website called AmazingLittleWorld.com.
But what makes this a website? For all you click-thru’ers who are only here for the technical answer to my headline, I’ll cut to the chase so you can be off on your way – Oxford Dictionary says a website is a location connected to the Internet that maintains one or more pages (a hypertext document) on the World Wide Web.
But let’s think together… I submit that you are responsible for making this a website. Yes, you, the user that found your way here (of all places in the vast interwebs) make this a website.
Because… if you aren’t on this website, is this still a website?
This might seem like a fruitless re-proposition of one of my favorite classic philosophical questions, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” But that perplexing thought experiment mainly purports to challenge whether things can only exist if perceived, like say, a sound only exists if it is heard. While that metaphysical quandary can be questioned of a website as it can anything, I’ll save this thought experiment for another day.
When I ask, “If you aren’t on this website, is this still a website”, I’m wondering whether and when a website becomes its truest self, an actual living breathing (functioning) website.
Is it a website when I registered the domain name? Is it a website after the HTML and CSS code document is created? Is it a website when the markup language is published on a web connected server? No, no, and not yet.
If you aren’t on this website, it is not a website. But now that you’re here, you’re seeing it. So it is.
You made this website it’s truest self. You, through your web browser, brought innocuous letters and numbers and symbols to life.
The code in and of itself is not a website. Just like life itself, a website results from two mates converging – me, the designer, and you, the user. I designed the blueprints, put them in web server purgatory and you found them and converted the instructions through a browser into the website it was always meant to be. A website isn’t a website until and only when it is visited and displayed and interacted with. Otherwise the code and supposed website itself is dormant and useless. A website is code enlivened by the user.
So thank you, dear user, for making this a real website! I literally couldn’t have done it without you. So I hope you come back soon 🙂