How specific or how abstract do you like your websites-as-worlds?

[Corrupted Unicorn]

Most webweavers here will conceive their website as a virtual "place": a corner, a zone, just an area for themselves. Many of them also like to make it look into a more specific "place": a cottage in the woods, an abandoned mall, a space station, etc.

Whether you are one of those people who are trying to make like a little game thru websites or you just post the things you like on your site... how do you like to portray your website? Do you like it when websites take forms closer to the physical world, or do you take advantage of a website's inherent looks and "abstractness" (for lack of a better term)? How to achieve the perfect balance of verosimilitude and navigability?

I'm going to add an example of what I mean: Neopets makes its best effort to convey itself as a virtual world you can explore by clicking around. There's maps depicting fantasy locations that lead you to shops and games, often headed by a character who says a few lines of dialogue. The biggest fan-writing portion of the site, the Neopian Times, takes the shape of a newspaper! However, not all the pages are as "immersive" as the aforementioned: for example, the Games page, presumably an arcade, is just a directory of games for ease of navigation.

What do you do to make your websites feel more like the thing you're aiming for? Discuss 

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

The websites that I like feel usually more like digitalized people, rather than digitalized places. It has always been that way - pages that really try to emulate places seemed always a bit gimmicky to me. The things I enjoyed the most were tutorial sites, discussion boards, and so on.

However, the idea of (and desire for) digitalized places is known to me, and I attempted to create them myself. I believe that the desire for them is caused by technological advance that makes spaces (and places) disappear. Paul Virilo wrote about this whole issue, and I stumbled upon him and his theory (ironically) when researching for the "Digital Museum".

[Melooon]

When you read a book, the book contains a place, but it also contains a story and characters, and as you read it you become that place and that story and those characters; you are a Hobbit just as much as you are Mt Doom. The book is not a literal place so much as it offers the building materials for you to enter an abstract world that exists in between your imagination and outer world you know.

Websites are like that too  When you enter a website you construct an temporary identity for yourself in the websites reality; that identity is made up from who you are, and what the websites suggests you could become. For example, If a website tells you it is a cathedral, then you know that you should become large and peaceful; if a website tells you its a cafe, you should be comfortable and chatty. All that is to say; I think that the analogy of spaces in websites is a literary tool, but instead of using language to express itself, it uses textures and titles and gifs!

With that out of the way, I think website land would certainly have its own laws of physics and structure. Just because a human house does not have a room that is made of a list links, does not mean a website house would not have such a room. In fact I think a website house not having a link list room would be just a weird as a human house not having a bathroom! In website land cathedrals can be made of pink smiley faces, in website land your bio can be inside a giant cheese, in website land there can be rooms where everyone spins around for no reason and the word "Jinkies" flashes in the sky for a million years! All of these things are perfectly normal

Sooo, I think abstraction and description are both types of imagination, and the analogies used (or not used) in web crafting are equally influential for the visitor. If I show you a white page titled "this is a website", then I have enchanted that blank whiteness with every idea, fear and sense of space you can imagine when you hear those words; if I show you a page beautifully decorated as a river and say "welcome to my web river", Iv done exactly the same thing; but you are thinking something a little different  Website land exists whether you like it or not, because you exist 

[JINSBEK]

Well! That's kind of a weird question for me to answer because it's not like we& stick to making only one "type" of website—one type of place, one type of story, one type of scope—that's just not how we do it.

My "main" website looks like a glossy art magazine so I really want to evoke that kind of sensibility via the mix of fonts, use of typography in general, the arrangement of visual/multimedia and text elements in each piece. Do magazines "feel" like places, do they feel like "paper"? Or neither of that? To me, magazines feel like a heightened immersion of ideas. You are submerged in a concept, and all of its hitherto hidden links and connections to other things. It's like peak thought-cloud or abstract free association for me—that's what a magazine is. Like a dream--a mirror showing multiple things from multiple places at once. There's basically zero diegetic GUI design there.

We have one website that takes explicitly from Pueblo Deco and the American Southwest, we have one website that looks like Lest's desk (don't ask…), we have one website that looks like... ...honestly it takes a lot from the Children's of Alabama hospital and we didn't even consciously realise it until just now?? Until I started thinking about it? Lmao. Let's just say it's very accessible and modern-looking without being sterile at all. It's even a bit playful. Whatever photos you find of it on the Internet do it no justice, you really have to walk through the hospital yourself to feel how really friendly the whole space feels--architecturally.

Aural identity and sense of place (sound design) are very important to me--and the rest of my guys--so things like background music and sound effects, ambience are going to play a huge role in our next website. Websites. You know it's not just the "spatial relations" of one page to another, e.g. what pages link to which pages. It's everything you feel in each and every part. Even from one section of the page to the next!

What do you put in motion, how is it in motion, how do certain elements work "autonomously", how do they respond to user interaction (e.g. hover-over, clicking?). Do things change over time, or happen at only specific dates and times? There's a lot of things you can do with websites now. Website design can be a lot like game design--if you choose to do so.

[candycanearter07]

I would like to make mine more recreating a place, but tearing up my site is intimidating.

[ValyceNegative]

I've always liked to think of websites as personal rooms, like it's your own bedroom where you are writing from: the footer is either the bed or the desk and the structure of menus and content viewer is what's directly above it- shelves, wall of posters, libraries...

I tried to change a bit when first starting my mainsite and so the first version had the central column that looked like the side of a building: articles and drawings were affixed to it, the menus at the side were neon signs, and at the top there was a balcony too! But then I had the header which really didn't fit with the theme and the footer too gave me headscratchings, so I went back to the bedroom feeling.

Alternatively, I also like sites that look like sketchbook pages or diaries!

[Corrupted Unicorn]

I would like to make mine more recreating a place, but tearing up my site is intimidating.

If you don't want to tear down, build upon.

Make an "alternative" webpage/set of webpages where the information is displayed in a different way.

Remove links to parts of your site you no longer want, but keep the webpages there, just in case.

Here's an example I like a lot, of a website with two "alternative" browsing methods. One of them is your usual web browing experience, the other is more of a "place", a house you visit its different rooms: https://cyberneticdryad.neocities.org/

Happy webweaving! 

[CoolKid575]

My site is essentially just a directory of links right now, but I want to eventually have it look sort of like a PDA; with the screen displaying the content with discrete nav buttons on the side, the idea being that the viewer is looking through my personal files and notes. I really like a lot of the more abstract sites people have on here, but I feel like having mine be more grounded in a physical medium will help it feel more "personal" and in better alignment with my interests compared to a more wacky design. I've still got a lot of HTML / CSS to learn until I'll be able to pull that off though.