Icarus Studios News

I recently heard someone insinuate that websites were “where it's at” but social networking was dead-in-the-water, an over-hyped idea. Maybe he was trying to make a joke but it sort of blew my mind. To me, a successful website is a form of social networking. Social networking is not some new fad—it's how we get along in life.

The service you are seeking to provide as a Web designer is about facilitating the communication between two or more people. It's not about the tools you're using; instead, it’s all about how you, as a unique personality, choose to use them. It's not simply about organizing another person's copy in a way that looks pleasant, but how you've made sure the right words hit the right chords. Actually, it's not even about the site itself as a product.

What makes one website better than another is how invited the user feels to talk to the people behind the pages, how the site makes the visitor feel about the advertised product, and how the site can be grown into a community. Is it open to change? Is it being monitored by someone interested in its progress and the people who visit? Is it a conduit in and of itself?

The difference between this sort of design and the design work of, for instance, a sculptor, is that the sculptor is designing in order to fulfill the physical needs of the art and the consumer needs of a single, specified client. The website is a form of mass communication, but that doesn't mean that its job ends when the tool is able to successfully reach a million possible viewers. Its job is finding the common need of those million some odd viewers, satisfying it, then keeping them there once you've grabbed their attention. This is a process that has to constantly be adjusted and is, at its root, very social; the entirety of its success is characterized strictly by its relations.

They might not be purely user/user relations but the publisher is still of human society, wanting to work within human society, and for humanistic reasons. The designer is responsible for facilitating that exchange, not just for making things acceptable to look at and load.

-Miri Funderburk, Virtual Worlds Team