What is a web page?
How you answer this question will probably depend on your level of involvement with and general feelings about the web, your knowledge of web page coding, and your awareness of developments in contemporary culture, not to mention your income, geographical location, and age.
I saw my first web page in the early 1990's and made my first page soon after. Since then I've lost count of the number of different pages and sites I've worked on, but I still come back to this basic question... what is a web page?
In a technical sense, a web page is still not that dissimilar from the first web pages created by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at Cern in the 1980's. Of course they weren't able to embed videos or communicate with hand held devices in those days, but the web page is still essentially a means of disseminating information, and the essential component (if not the defining principle) of any web page remains the same, specifically, it's ability to be linked with another page or pages, as in the hyperlink.
The hyper link is intrinsic to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), the language used to write web pages, and HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), the means by which we are able to access web pages... the rest, as they say, is history.
Basically, the difference between a web designer and a graphic designer is the use of HTML. In the early days of web design, the look of a web page was created as a two dimensional (rather than hyper dimensional) design by graphic designers, who would then hand these "flat" designs over to web developers to create the code for the page. Consequently, much of the look of the web took on a paper/magazine based identity, which to a large extent remains today.
Since the majority of web page users are familiar with the magazine/book layout with an index at the front, web sites still tend to be read as books or magazines, and flicked through using either the index to navigate, or in a linear "book like" fashion using the "next" button. Whereas, using a web page's hyperlink potential to it's full (or Information Architecture as it's known) might more usefully be thought of as being 3 rather than 2 dimensional chess, or a hierarchical / pyramidical structure of possibilities.
I suspect that in a few years time when the first real gaming generations are reaching middle age, the humble web page will have transcended it's initial relationship to the traditional reading model of the book.
How you respond to this in terms of the design and functionality of your web site should however depend on your specific industry sector and your visitors/clients expectations.
Bizbro Web Design
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