The web got better. Did it get less interesting?

The early internet felt like a new frontier: a place for creativity that could hold everyone’s imagination. That potential remains, yet ask designers what the web looks like today and a different picture emerges: one that’s familiar, optimized, and increasingly difficult to distinguish from itself. 

We brought together five jury members of Websites of the Year 2026—Tristan Bagot, Fabian Harb, Khyati Trehan, Gina Guasch, and Rafael Bessa—and asked them to look beyond what makes a “good” website. What’s missing from today’s web? What conventions have become invisible? And what could become possible if we started thinking about the web differently? 

How conventions mold the web

It’s become easier than ever to make websites. No-code builders have democratized the process, but somewhere along the way, the way these tools have been built has begun to limit creativity rather than unleash it. “I don’t think the tools are the problem—their defaults are,” says art director, creative developer, and co-founder of HTTB.EU, Tristan Bagot. “Every website builder, framework, or component library comes with a template and a set of ‘best practices,’ and most people never step outside of them. The tool makes the decisions a designer used to make, and it makes them the same way for everyone.” 

As more creative decisions are absorbed into templates, component libraries, and AI tools, designers inherit someone else’s rules instead of creating their own on a blank canvas. But this standardization isn’t only coming from the tools themselves. 

“A big shift happened with the arrival of Web 2.0: social media, platforms, and website builders. We moved away from the desire for websites with strong visual qualities and toward the desire for websites with strong technical functionalities: optimized loading speeds, adopting UI standards, extended SEO for better Google ranking, and so on,” says Fabian Harb, co-founder and head of type design at Dinamo. “And with this increased focus and expectation on performance, click-rates, and how attention should translate into sales, the web became a very streamlined and homogeneous world.” 

What began as a medium for visual experimentation became increasingly defined by performance, usability, and measurable outcomes. Practicality and utility were important—after all, the web is a place for everyone, and a website has to be comprehensible for an expansive audience—but conventions introduced by established platforms gradually became expectations, restricting the range of what a website could be. 

“Usability has come a long way, and that’s a genuine win, but it shouldn’t limit creativity by turning Big Tech’s best practices into dogmas,” says designer, art director, and principal designer on PayPal’s Innovation Team, Rafael Bessa.

“A convention is a great starting point, but it shouldn’t be a law.”—Rafael Bessa

There’s always a trade-off: prioritizing usability and performance by following similar rulebooks can come at the expense of something less measurable. “When everything feels too correct or familiar, it risks losing its identity and not making us feel anything at all,” says Gina Guasch, founder of Gina Guasch Team. She sees the consequence not only in how websites look, but in what they leave out. “Legibility and rationality are often prioritized in a way that unnecessarily leaves out anything sensory or organic,” she adds.

A website is more than a collection of pages

We’ve inherited a rather narrow idea of what a website is: a series of pages, arranged for easy navigation, with information presented in predictable ways. It’s easy to forget that instead of simply being a container of information, a website can invite participation, create an experience, or become a portal to somewhere else.

The web, ultimately, can be a place for connection, where our individual and collective experiences can meet, collide, and interact in interesting ways.  “Being social seems as if it’s reserved for social media, but the web can feel so much more shared!” she adds.

That experience isn’t driven by content alone. The way a website behaves as you move through it—how it responds, loads, or changes—can shape what you feel and take away from it, too. Tristan puts it simply: “A website isn’t a picture. A mockup is one moment. A website has to behave.” He adds that time, motion, and rhythm are design decisions that bring meaning and context, allowing designers to work with the qualities of the web itself, rather than simply designing on top of it.

The most personal is the most creative

For Rafael, that willingness to treat the web as a medium in its own right rather than just a canvas was once more visible in digital design. “When I started my career, digital design was still in its early stages, and all that experimentation showed how wide the space of possible solutions really was,” he says. “Every site was a proposal for what the web could be.”

As the web expanded, some of that experimentation and individuality was sanded away by shared references and conventions—things designers can push against by being willing to confuse and challenge. “You need to know your audience and adopt a particular tone for each project, instead of trying to please everyone,” says Gina. With that should come an openness to explore the unfamiliar, even when it initially feels uncomfortable or unappealing. “We shouldn’t be so afraid of ugliness: what feels uncomfortable at first can also change and expand our idea of what’s beautiful,” she says.

More than ever, perhaps what websites need is evidence of human creativity—a marker of the person who crafted it and the choices only they could have made.

“I’d love to see examples that serve as reminders of a human being at the other end of the code; that someone built this.”—Khyati Trehan

“I heard Parasite director Bong Joon Ho quote Martin Scorsese: ‘The most personal is the most creative,’ as he accepted an Oscar for Best Director, and there’s so much truth in it,” says Khyati. Fabian agrees, adding that the path to a more distinctive web might just be “Less monopolies and corporate BS, and more personal voices and human dimensions.”

Why make a website at all? 

As the web evolves, its most interesting question may be one of purpose: what’s worth putting out there in the first place? “In the age of LLMs, where you can summon information, what does a website offer, and how can we give it a reason to exist?” Khyati asks. 

That question becomes more complicated as the web moves beyond being a place to simply publish information. Increasingly, technology can generate, summarize, and simulate things for us, while platforms already mediate much of how we communicate with each other. In that context, the value of putting something online can’t simply be that it exists there. The web, then, has to do things differently and bring something to the experience of being human.

For Tristan, that means looking closely at what the web already offers and asking what it can meaningfully contribute instead of simply adding to what’s already there. “Today the web is a bit like the night sky. It’s there, it shines, it’s endless, but at least you can still learn from it because it took so long to create,” he says. “It was built through human interaction, and if the web ends up replacing those connections, technology will have taken us one step back. So the question I’d like designers to ask is simple: what really deserves to be online and what’s better left in real life?” 

Websites of the Year 2026 is now open. Submit your website and get it seen by our jury and audience. Winners will receive editorial coverage, jury feedback, a Readymag subscription, and more. Entries are free, and the deadline is September 30.