Communication…yes again!
To balance yesterday’s slightly pessimistic post, I came across this brilliant statistic yesterday whilst doing some research – the average web page has tripled in size over the last 5 years and the average number of objects has doubled.
Objects are defined as: “images, audio, video, and external CSS and JavaScript files.”
I think this is interesting because it’s another symptom of the fact that sites are increasingly collections of different services but it also got me thinking that web sites can be thought of as today’s stone tablets. In this context, they are equally (if not more) multi-dimensional than the Mayan tablets I wrote about yesterday.
In fact sites operate on at least 4 different axes:
Functional: they do things for people or perform services
Literal: they typically have a literal communication
Visual: they ought to be visually appealing and communicate graphically
Relational: they typically point to other related information
(I realised there are more after I made the drawing and I’m too lazy to make a new one)
Web sites are also creative outlets that speak volumes about the people who made them so there’s also the:
Structural: the communication that comes from the form, style or structure of the site
technological: the kind of technology that was used in the site’s creation also communicates.
Each of these dimensions can carry a different set of “messages” making web sites capable of extremely rich levels of communication. All of which makes approaching the building of a web site with a “communications-industry” mindset feel a bit wasteful.
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