Websites: life and death stuff

This article is written by guest contributor Eric Price.

How does a website age?

Starting with the "boring" one. A typical corporate or ecommerce site, optimized for managing institutional complexity and the market needs of the entities they represent, takes an iterative approach. It's hard to pin down where they were born and when they passed, even as their human stewards come and go. It's all "agile" without an endpoint, that one particular immortal jellyfish species we've all read about at some point. A sitewide module is removed here, a new page template is born on the outskirts there.

A more interesting case: a smaller business – a local restaurant's website perhaps, is frozen in amber, for a time. Paid a niece or nephew (the birth), and Flash worked at the time, later a PDF. It's mostly reductive to say that in this case the worse the website the better the establishment, but there's a charm and nostalgia to these virtual places. The faded-but-beautiful awning originally typeset in a font called God-knows-what. The cause of death usually involves a "website-building" platform that sponsors a lot of podcasts.

Arts and culture websites are similarly often stamped in time with the marks of their creators, the strong-willed visual tastes of the curators, or the holding-the-fort-together web editors, or the passionate artists, or the designers with just enough pent-up artistic ambition to see a project as an opportunity for novel digital form-making (cue arguments about the shape of radio buttons). But the inventive ones build in a lifecycle from the start.

These sites aren't too dissimilar from the mom-and-pop shop. Budgets and resources and time are at a premium. But they have and continue to offer strategies for leading an interesting life. In many cases, they foretold where we are now. The former Whitney website's day-and-night cycle blew minds. A website that exists temporally, with a sunrise/sunset event? It seems quaint now, but it's "dark mode" years before the fact.

Ballroom Marfa's website, designed to resemble the building's iconic facade, was built to evolve in a different way, with the site's surface reacting to the color tonality of event imagery, much like the facade reacts to the colorful desert sun. Process is important; when such things are planned from the start, they remain regardless of budgets or resources.

Examples abound. The artist Johannes Girardoni's website is an exhibition space of sorts, with a splash screen interactive work that eventually gets replaced by another. Updating Easy Lessoning appears to be as simple as taking a photo of the sky. Zarigüeya (possum in Spanish) was "alive" in a sense, flipping over and playing dead if you weren't careful. While it was active, the microsite for ICA Boston's Art in the Age of the Internet reacted to its visitors (both interacting with the site and visiting the actual galleries). Ever-evolving designs for K, a Berlin exhibition space in conjunction with the KW Institute, fit with its stated claims that "a website is never ready."

All of this thinking and experimentation used to be more common, when the web was newer and less sanded-down, but it has lasting relevance to plotting out a site's lifecycle today. Now it may require a virtual archeological dig outside the (literal) domain of a site's most recent CMS, or a trip to archive.org.

Archive.org is the afterlife.