The Humble Hyperlink
I’m a web designer. I drool over designs of websites and dream in CSS. I’m a developer. I love code that does awesome things. I love tying the two together and making beautiful things that do great stuff. But at the end of the day my favourite thing about the web isn’t the pretty sites or the funky coding, it’s the humble hyperlink.
I saw my first site when the pages were grey and there was no funky code or beautiful design. I fell in love with the World Wide Web for one basic element of its underlying design: the ability to make connections.
The other day I read an article where a designer/developer described this stage of development, when I fell in love, as the boring bit before we could do anything good with it. I heartily disagree.
The best website I’ve ever seen was simply the lyrics to We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy Joel. There were no headers or footers. The page was grey. The links were out of the box blue. There was no unnecessary content. There was just the title and the words; and every word or phrase was hyper-linked off to somewhere to explain the meaning of the lyrics. This was before Wikipedia, so the links went to a dozen different sites containing all that information. That site was the perfect encapsulation of what the web can do.
You could remake that page with a nicer background and a nifty font. What would it add to it?
You could use jQuery to make little pop up boxes for the information and pull it all from a single source with an API. You could just link it all straight to Wikipedia. But then have you made it more or made it less by reducing the link diversity and making everything look the same?
This isn’t an argument against pretty design or against using fancy coding and technology. I love both those things very much. They can enhance the experience when used well. It’s an argument for being mindful of semantics; for remembering to bake in meaning and link diversity to your sites.
It’s an argument to remember that the web is about hyperlinks. It’s about the connection they allow you to make between pieces of information and between the real people beyond the computer screens. On an underlying level everything should exist to serve those meaningful connections, not because it’s good SEO technique (which it also is), but because it’s what the web gives us the ability to do.
As a web designer and a developer we’re helping to build something huge, sprawling, and amazing; and all of it made possible by those little hyperlinks. Building websites has never been boring.
