WIRED studied 10,000 websites and found there’s been a steady reduction in the diversity of website design.
… the internet is a shared cultural artifact, and its distributed, decentralized nature is what makes it unique. As home pages and fully customizable platforms such as NeoPets and MySpace fade into memory, web design may lose much of its power as a form of creative expression. The Mozilla Foundation has argued that consolidation is bad for the “health” of the internet, and the aesthetics of the web could be seen as one element of its well-being.
And if sites are looking more similar because many people are using the same libraries, the large tech companies who maintain those libraries may be gaining a disproportionate power over the visual aesthetics of the internet. While publishing libraries that anyone can use is likely a net benefit for the web over keeping code secret, big tech companies’ design principles are not necessarily right for every site.
I think there is more opportunity for website diversity now than ever before.
Take for example that there are thousands of WordPress themes in the official gallery alone, leave alone custom ones. Each of these themes can be customised in many ways at different levels: from the options WordPress offers, the theme itself offers and, like in the days of old, editing the code itself. All of this is true of other content management, site-builder and store-builder platforms too. It’s another issue that most people don’t bother with much customisation, and an even bigger one that the vast majority of people that write do so on social networks, or on hosted writing platforms like Medium.
There’s more to it, though. The writers of the article are right when they say the internet is a shared cultural artefact. But the web is only a part of that. Further, the diversity they measure is visual, which is but one aspect of communication.
There is a tremendous explosion in creativity in communication in the form of email newsletters – not the web, but certainly the internet. Not as visually expressive as a website, but diverse nevertheless.
Then, for all its addictiveness, the app-only Instagram has allowed millions of people to express themselves visually, but through photographs. The web had its chance with Flickr, Photobucket and numerous other sites. 500px exists, but its few million users pale in comparison to Instagram’s billion plus.
We don’t think of podcasts when we think of the internet, but it’s a huge part and a definite cultural artefact. Podcasts have exploded in the creativity of topic, of format, of monetisation, even podcast players themselves. Consider a podcast as an aural instead of a visual blog or website, and the diversity is immediately obvious.
Once you expand your perspective of what the Internet means, what diversity means, you realise that even with the convergence in the design of websites, the Internet as a whole has exploded with diversity. It’s more vibrant now than ever before in its history.