Importance and Intrigue: What Keeps Websites on Top

In this day and age the average person would usually take websites for granted.  Many youths and college students cannot recall a time where one couldn't Google whatever information that they needed or spend hours on social media networks.  The internet is seen as something consistent and ever-present, there to fulfill one’s needs.  What many people fail to realize is that websites are doing more than simply ‘being there.’ The site developers take into account the audience’s needs, and creates the individual sites accordingly.  There is more to a website than simply clicking a link.

Carolyn Handa, in Multimedia Rhetoric, gives a thorough explanation into the rhetoric involved in website development. Instead of simply being magical portals of continuous links and information, the individual website must cater to the needs of the audience.  As Handa explains, “Web site construction today must therefore involve gathering data through Web analysis programs, mining the data properly, understanding the data, and then translating that understanding into Web pages that are highly effective in their rhetorically fused presentation” (pp. 85).  As you can see, there is more to building websites than simply throwing information on the virtual page.

The question here is this: why is it so important to go through such a tedious process in the building of a webpage? With the millions of websites and billions of hyperlinks available at one’s fingertips, what makes certain websites so special—and additionally, what makes some websites fail?  Is it the lack of rhetoric involved in the building of the page? Or is it something more?

Exigence may be the answer to our question.  The timing in which the website holds may be key to its success.  M. Killingsworth, in his text Appeals to Time, gives a thorough investigation of the importance of time.  The key for making websites is to create them to harness a general as well as a specific audience, and to create and maintain the site to continually meet with the needs of the time.  By this, Killingsworth proposes the notion that time in the modern era has become something no longer an abstract concept, but something of physical value.  This physical value seeps into the exigence, with exigence being “topics emerg[ing] as urgent considerations at a particular historical time” (pp. 38). 

With this in mind, I wish to leave you with some questions:

• In the era of fast-paced information and internet surfing, how great of a role does timing and rhetoric play? Is it used for all popular websites, including that of social media (such as Facebook and Myspace) and pages of general information (such as Wikipedia)?  
• What appeals to time do successful webpages make- do they stick to staying modern, or can there be a sense of the past which will still bring in the readers? 
• How do these appeals to time, and the idea of time in the modern era (the shift from abstract to concrete) affect how a person navigates through the web?