Quiet web

What does a quiet website look like? For some reason I found myself asking this question repeatedly lately. A quick search for quiet web on Google doesn’t bring up a lot of content. I honestly can’t believe I’m one of the few people to have ever thought about a quiet web. I’m obviously talking about this notion of quietness as a response to the ever increasing amount of noise the web seems to be filled with. The idea of a quiet web in the context of the current attention economy seems a bit paradoxical but I’m not worried about that. I’m more interested in the question itself: what does a quiet website look like?

Can a site be memorable and quiet at the same time? And what makes a site noisy? Those are interesting questions, at least for me. Plenty of people have written about the current state of the web, about the problems with the advertising model, about privacy, about the impact of social media. Those are all important aspects of the web. But are not what I am personally interested in.

Websites are the building blocks of the web experience and that is why I’m interested in individual websites rather than the web as a whole. What can each site do to make the web a quieter place? What can I, as a web designer and developer, do to help? It’s a fascinating question.