Your website is not a brochure.

In my post on responsive design one of the underlying themes was that modern web designers have been, and still are, held back by models coming from old media. The use of the term “brochure website” is another one of these unhelpful old tropes. It fails to articulate that a website is a thing in its own right. You don’t need to add the term “brochure” to it. When you do that you make a site less than it is capable of being by pigeonholing it into an older model of media interaction.

A website is not a brochure. It is a website, which is a totally different thing on a fundamental level from a brochure. It is not a flat, printed object that gets read in a linear fashion. It is a 4-dimensional space where users interact with content, actively and over time.

The best thing about websites and the internet isn’t fancy, pixel perfect design. It isn’t clever code. It’s the humble hyperlink. That little underlined (or not) word or phrase that takes you somewhere is the killer app of the internet. The hyperlink is what changes everything into a new medium which is unlike any other. Clicking a hyperlink isn’t simply the same thing as turning the page of a brochure. It is so much more than that.

The term “brochure website” is bad because it encourages small, flat thinking about what the layout and structure will be, and therefore about what kind of content you put onto it. It conjures up certain navigational elements and styles. It creates a box filled with stereotypical tropes of what it should contain. It suggests a standalone, finalised object.

The very idea of a site being standalone and finalised are antithetical to the concept of the internet itself. Everything online is about connections between pieces of information, and between people.

You don’t need to diminish a site by calling it a “brochure website”. The term “website” is an adequate term in its own right for what it is. A website is not a flat thing; it’s a building and a maze and a spiders web.

Why are web designers placing this linguistic restraint on themselves and the potential creativity of our medium in this way? How we phrase things to clients is how they will understand what we do and what we are capable of doing for them. With this new medium, they rely on us to explain to them the scope of what can be done.

I can understand the need to frame a simple definition that clients can understand, but if we explain it to them in diminished and limiting terms like this, then we are putting in unnecessary constraints on what the web can become. We run the risk that we are self-limiting with language the more exciting and useful things that we can do for them. We put a barrier into our own path.