I’m a subscriber to Scientific American. I recently read a great article titled “The Cosmic Origins of Time’s Arrow” by Sean M. Carrol. It’s on page 48 of their June 2008 issue. The author nicely described entropy as “a measure of the disorder of a system”. It’s an article about the universe, time, and our perception of it. While reading the article though, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was an article about building websites.

Give It a Little Time

Most sites grow with time. Throw a few extra webmasters into the mix, and you could have a real mess. Things change, you get new ideas, promotions come and go, the list goes on. Unless you have the occasional site makeover, things can get especially crazy on the back end. All these things are victims of time, and the amount of disorder is the entropy factor. More time, most likely higher entropy. For a website, you want low entropy.

The Big Bang

So you have a wonderful idea, you register your domain, and start building your new website. This is the time to enjoy because the entropy factor is as low as it is going to get. Your site is simple, it’s easy to edit, and it is very focused on that brilliant idea you just had.

Time Moves On

In the cosmic world, gravity is the major mover of the stars, but in the world of web development it’s the author of the site controlling the stars. The slightest new feature can change your sites entropy, and it can be effected by as something as one small post on your blog.

Imagine a farmer with a new blog. He decides to write his first post about his favorite type of tractor. The blog software asks for the category to place the article in, and since it’s the first, he creates a tractor category. He now has a blog with just one article. It now has a new category, Tractors, and it also has a nice new void, all things not tractors. Add a little more time, and there could be several categories, and potentially several sub-categories. Entropy level increasing, and more for the visitor to figure out.

Quick Chaos Without Gravity, Entropy High

Now imagine that same farmer who likes to blog, as a man with a tie instead of a straw hat. His site hits it big time, and turns out to be the most popular farmer resource on the net. There is his blog, a busy forum, a store, advice section, weather services, and so on. His site has rapidly expanded, and as you could imagine so has the level of chaos. Does the site have a high entropy level now? Not necessarily. The level of chaos might be high for the man in charge, but if the site is done correctly, it will have strong gravitational (navigational) pulls. With solid navigation, and clear paths for the visitors to take, the level of entropy can at least seem reasonably low. It all depends on how the sites content has been controlled by navigation.

Depending on the site, high entropy might just be the facts of life. Microsoft’s site, and their services would be a classic example of high entropy with high gravity. Using Sean Carroll’s article as a reference, I would even guess Microsoft has a few black holes, and some that have even evaporated away. Thousands upon thousand of web pages, all interlinking, some you may never see even if you tried.

Controlling Entropy

A site that is growing is usually a good indication of good health. Unfortunately, this means an increase level of entropy. So how do you control it? Avoid the big bang. When you start your site, be forced to add new levels of complexity, don’t start with it. Limit your menu items to the least required, and keep navigation simple. Using this technique a natural method of navigation will create itself. New content will easily be grouped and categorized, and new visitors will easily follow your lead. The entropy factor will still be increasing, but now you at least know one way on how to slow it down.