Web Designas Architecture?

Web Design…as Architecture?

It's a curious notion, but not exactly a new one. Web designers often pull out the architecture metaphor to expound upon the virtues of a good web site. "A good web site feels like a physical space," they say. "It's like a house with many rooms and doors." The rooms, of course, are the pages of the site, and the doors are the links from one to another.

Then there's information architecture, a kind of specialty field in the world of web site construction. Information architects hone the structure of a sitecall it the floor planso that the visitors don't get lost as they wander around.

Architecture must have been on somebody's mind from the very beginning, because we call these things sites, not resources, pools, objects, or quantities, which you have to admit is pretty remarkable. Computer geeks prefer mathematical metaphors. It's a wonder we're not all "positing web aggregates." And these people aren't known for their poetic flair, so there's got to be something inherent to the process that lends itself to architectural terms.

If you're looking to this humble tome for an answer, I'm afraid you're in for a disappointment. I have no clue why web design seems to go with architecture, besides the extension-of-metaphor thing. And to tell you the truth, I hadn't thought much about it, until my editor lobbed me this book idea.

"Dreamweaver Design-Build," his email said. "Best design practices using Dreamweaver. Fast prototyping using Dreamweaver. Fast web development."

"Cool idea," I replied.

That's when he informed me, all coolness aside, that design-build is an actual architectural movement. It stresses fast-track, high-quality construction by consolidating the tasks of design and build. I wasn't surprised to learn that in this country, we typically have designers and builders. They're different contractors, each distrusting the other, sometimes trying to get away with as little as possible. Occasionally, they wind up in litigation, after busting the budget and blowing deadlines, and the resulting building is of poor quality and filled with defects.

The design-build philosophy seeks to change all that. In it, you have a single firm that takes ownership of a project from blueprint to ribbon-cutting. By necessity, design-builders are agile but muscular. They can't get away with knowing a lot about a little, nor can they succeed by knowing a little about a lot. They have to know a lot about a lot. In other words, they have to learn their trade. More than that, they strive to become master builders, like the kind who gave us the Parthenon and the pyramids, though without all the slaves and human sacrifices, one hopes. And with the master's skill comes the master's appreciation. When design-builders envision a structure, they don't see a price tag. They see vaults and arches. They're hopeless Romantics.

Sometimes established practices believe that profit, speed, and quantity trump quality, and that good design belongs in a museum. The failure of these ideas lies in the fact that design-build can be cheaper. And faster. And it can yield better, longer lasting, and more satisfying results.

If my editor was trying to appeal to my political sensibilities, he had certainly pushed the right buttons. One of the first things I did as a creative director was to build that bridge to the coding crew and concede to them whatever made development easier. In return, they stopped trying to design the front end. When we started acting like a single provider instead of two independent, competing departments, we got things done better. And faster. And cheaper.

I don't usually go in for marketing copy, but the tagline for the DBIAthe Design-Build Institute of Americareally caught my eye: "Return to the time-honored approach of the master builder," it says, "where a single source has absolute accountability for both design and construction." When you're talking concepts for a Dreamweaver book, you can't get much better. Dreamweaver has always been an excellent fit for the single sources among us, the independent designer/developers for whom the Web is a passion, not just (or maybe not even) a paycheck, who build web sites to be used and enjoyed, not as an excuse to send out an invoice. It occurred to me then (and my editor long before me, I'm sure), that while there are millions of books about Dreamweaver on the market, several thousand of which I myself have contributed, there isn't one that specifically shows you how to use Dreamweaver to build great web sites that respect the user. Dreamweaver as a tool of Revolution. Now that really caught my interest.

By now I was basically sold, but I knew that, if I was going to write this, I'd have to tone down my rhetoric. It was no good delivering a rambling manifesto. I'd probably wind up in Guantanamo Bay. No, I'd have to play it subversively, couching the politics in the architecture metaphor, all of which begged one important question: If Web design was indeed like architecture, could you apply the principles of design-build to it? Could you become a Web design-builder? I was curious to see how far I could stretch it, so I delved deeper into the DBIA's brochure and turned up a list of design-build benefits. Entering comparative-mythology mode, I decided to check for correlations:

Single responsibility

Check. This book is especially for independent designer/developers, and you don't need to know anything about Dreamweaver or web production to read it. The design-build philosophy is about process and results, and you get plenty of both in these pages.

Quality

Check. This book puts at least as much emphasis on what you're building as it does on how you build it, and it shows you how your design choices can improve the quality of your production experience.

Cost savings

Check. This book saves you effort, and if that saves you capital, then all the better.

Time savings

Check. This book saves you time. The design and production phases come together, with the one always looking toward maximizing the other. It may feel like you're moving through molasses at first, but just wait until you start to generate the pages. It's like they're coming off a printing press. And when you get to Chapter 20, you won't believe how quickly you can redesign your site, having built it upon the principles from the previous chapters.

Potential for reduced administrative burden

Check. Because you're a single source, you aren't building your Web site by committee, nor do you have to, as this book shows.

Early knowledge of firm costs

Check. After you get a few projects under your belt, you'll have a very good idea about exactly what it takes to get a Dreamweaver site up and running. The accuracy of your bottom-line estimates goes up, and the hassles from your clients go way down.

Improved risk management

Check. This book discusses the strengths and limitations of various web-building techniques and puts the cardinal virtues of accessibility and standards compliance into the real-world context of the Dreamweaver environment. If you decide not to do something on your site, you'll know exactly why you're not doing itand if you decide to break a rule, you'll know exactly why you're doing that, too.

A one-for-one match! Clearly my editor was on to something. The humble tome before you is the immediate result.