The readings that were needed for this week gave a particular strong emphasis on the layout and user experience of the Web 1.0 and what it means to be a website. Laurel's essay "my website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge, what could yours be?", focuses on what a website actually is, and that is just a bundle of files and folders tucked away in a server to be accessed periodically by the users. However, she makes the case that websites are transformative in nature, meaning that their form and content evolve based on who is the one designing the page. She then gives examples on how someone's website can transforms itself (as a room, garden, plant, or as a rock) and she goes into depth what each of those expressions (?) means under the context of the web. Personally, I would prefer my websites to be a combination of a plant and a room, growing organically while also having a feeling of closedness from the outside world. Due to the structure of this class, this website is going to be a plant, but I'll try to make it into my own room.
As for the second reading, Prof. Dr Style it ties beautifully with the previous reading, as it goes into depth of the style of old websites, and how each of the professor website has a tiny fragment of individuality that is reflected from their site. An example of this would be Prof. Dr. Eric Carlson, where he added a space gradient to their website because he was an astrophysicist and it fit both thematically with the content and personally with his work. This all to say, before the rise of homogenous websites, a great spark of creativity and individuality resonates with each of these pages. Which begs the question:
What went wrong?