My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever ... See more

This is why websites are so important. They allow the author to create not only works (the “objects”) but also the world (the rooms, the arrangement of rooms, the architecture!). Ideally, the two would inform each other in a virtuous, self-perfecting loop. This can be incredibly nurturing to an artist’s practice.

Links (rendered default blue and underlined—they’re the hypertext “HT” in HTML) are the oxygen of the web.

In this age of digital cacophony dominated by these platforms, no one is looking out for you… but you. It makes perfect sense, then, when individuals tell me they want their website to do the job of “setting the record straight” on who they are and what they do.

The web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network.

A website could also be a puddle. A puddle is a temporary collection of rainwater. They usually appear after rainstorms. Like a storm, creating a website can happen in a burst. Sometimes it’s nice to have a few bursts/storms of creating a website, since the zone can be so elusive. Some people even call rain “computer weather.”

However, clarity is one of many possible intentions for a website. There are other legitimate states of mind capable of communication—a surprising, memorable, monumental, soothing, shocking, unpredictable, radically boring, bizarre, mind-blowing, very quiet and subtle, and/or amazing website could work. You also need not limit yourself to only one ... See more

Artists excel at creating worlds. They do this first for themselves and then, when they share their work, for others. Of course, world-building means creating everything—not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself—the language, style, rules, and architecture.

In the early days of The Creative Independent, we sometimes thought of TCI’s website like a house next to a river. We considered the interviews the flowing water, as they were our house’s nutrients and source of life. We would collect and drink from the water every day. But sometimes, depending on its nutrient makeup, the water would change our hou... See more