Websites are like houses. The creator of Django confirms this idea I've had in my head for a while. While I lack his experience working with the internet, and I have not worked in construction or studied architecture, I see the similarities in the processes. I also believe these similarities will can help us correctly defined the future of websites.
Definitions
Most websites are, or should be, functional, so they're rarely foremost works of visual spectacle. I am excluding the genre of the Flash-based brochure sites, as they are closer to commercialized movies. I am referring to sites that foremost deal with data: its storage, distribution, presentation, aggregation, and management. Since the internet is about interacting with information, it doesn't do much good if the information is static, like in a brochure site. Therefore I'm referring to sites where the data is very dynamic. Of course, it doesn't matter what the site does; sites do a lot of things, from tracking your life to being a game.
If making websites was about visual spectacle, it would be more like making a painting or a movie, all about the visual feel with little concern about supporting functional, non-linear interactivity. Rather, making websites is different and harder in two ways. First, websites, like other software that support user-interaction are non-linear. This changes a lot of the underlying creative thought process. Instead of just imagining the natural, cumulative, visual progression of strokes on the canvas or frames in the clip, you have to think of use cases, the variety of paths that branch and fork depending on what the user is looking for. The user is given too much interactive power for linearity to work.
And that's how, for a while now, I've realized like many, many others, the website of our time is actually software.
Analogies
And making software is like making houses. Both tasks take a very long time. There are numerous stages, and I'm sure, variations of processes for projects of various scale. There are many components and with them, are constraints. And these standards must be met, or the result is unusable. Just like poisonous Chinese drywall doesn't meet standards, make people sick, and devalue the houses they're in; a website where there are ads anchored to malware or flash banners that interfere with the layout and content upon mouse-over will drive away readers and actually lower revenue, thanks to ad-block features on browsers and userscripts. Or something as careless as forgetting user-friendly color contrast.
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