Designhistory of the WWW: Website development from the perspective of genre and style theory

Since the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the internet has become one of the
most of important tools for information, entertainment, trade, and social contacts. From a primitive,
text-based medium, the web has become a highly advanced and complex mass-multi-medium
representing multiple forms of design. Despite the web’s importance as a design medium, the
development of website design has only been sporadically described. As yet, we have no
historical, chronological descriptions of web design history similar to what we find, for example, in
the study of art or ‘‘analogue’’ design history. The article demonstrates how website development
can be analysed from a genealogical point of view. It does so by pointing out a number of genre and
style formations and discussing their ideological and cultural sources. It is argued that the main
engine for web development is the demand for renewal and differentiation from producers and
users, which leads to various technical, functional, and symbolic distinction strategies for website
design.