Good Day. I have tried, more than once, to count the web pages I have touched in twenty years of this work. Designed, rebuilt, migrated, repaired. The honest answer is that I cannot, but the number lives somewhere near twenty-four thousand eight hundred, and whatever the true figure is, it is large enough to have shown me something most people never get to see: how completely the purpose of a website has changed beneath us, while the thing kept the very same name.
When I started, a website was a library. You built page after page after page, because the website's job was to hold everything a business knew and to prove, by sheer thoroughness, that the business was real. The site was the credential. It was where a stranger went to decide whether to trust you, and trust was measured in completeness, the more you documented, the more substantial you appeared. We built vast, patient archives, and that was the work, and it was good work.
Almost none of that is true anymore, and the shift happened so gradually that few people noticed the ground move. A website is no longer a library. It is a conduit. Its job is not to hold everything you know; it is to carry one person, with as little friction as possible, from interest to action, a purchase made in a moment, a contact request captured before the impulse fades. The archive became a hallway. The credential became a checkout.
I find this genuinely remarkable, because the trust did not disappear. It moved. People no longer build their confidence in you by reading twenty pages of history. They form it in seconds, from the feel of the thing: how fast it loads, how clear the next step is, whether it respects their time. Trust used to be something you proved with volume. Now it is something you signal with restraint. The site that helps you is no longer the one that says the most. It is the one that asks the least of the person trying to buy.
Most businesses are still building the old website. They are filling a library, because that is what a website was the last time they thought hard about it, adding pages, history, paragraphs of reassurance, all of it pointing inward, all of it serving the owner's sense of substance rather than the customer's need to act. They are constructing a magnificent archive directly in front of a customer who only ever wanted the door.
Touching that many pages taught me to see the few that actually carried weight. In any project, large or small, almost everything is archive and a very little is conduit, and the entire art is telling them apart, then having the nerve to clear the archive away so the conduit can breathe. A city's website and a corner bakery's are governed by the identical truth: know the one thing this person came to do, and remove everything standing between them and doing it.
There is a kind of grief in this for someone like me, who loved the library, who took real pride in the deep, complete, beautifully organised archive. But the work is not nostalgia. The work is to serve the person on the other side of the screen as they actually are now: in a hurry, on a phone, deciding in seconds. They did not come for the library. They came to do one thing. Everything else, however lovingly made, is in their way.
So I no longer ask a client how much we should put on their website. I ask what one thing a visitor most needs to do, and how much we can remove so they can do it. Twenty years and twenty-four thousand pages, and the lesson at the end of all of them is the smallest one. Build the door, not the archive. Almost everything a website used to be, it no longer needs to be, and that is not a loss. It is permission to finally get out of the customer's way.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton