Studio Note: A Website as a Room of Your Own

What if a website did not feel like a business card, but like a room someone could enter?

Most websites for artists and small creators are built like elevator pitches: everything shouting at once, three seconds to convert a stranger, a button the size of a road sign. This makes sense if you are a startup. It makes no sense if you are a person.

A person needs a room.

A room has a door, and the door can be plain. Inside, things are arranged with some care — not to impress, but so a visitor can find them. There is a place to sit. There is work on the walls. There is, ideally, a window, which in website terms means: some sense that a real life continues beyond the page.

When I build a site for someone — a painter, a writer, a therapist, someone with a strange sincere project that resists elevator pitches — the questions are room questions:

• What should a visitor feel in the first ten seconds? (Not learn. Feel.)
• Where do the finished things live, and where do the growing things live?
• What is the one thing you actually want someone to do — write to you? read something? simply stay a while?
• What can we leave out? (Most of it. Almost always most of it.)

The technology matters less than people fear. A calm structure, honest words, readable type, and a page that loads before your tea cools — that is ninety percent of it. The remaining ten percent is character, and character comes from the person, not the template.

This note is filed under Studio Notes because the studio is where this thinking lives now. There will be more. The room is still being arranged.