Website design theory

[Tom]

The Wikipedia entry on Website Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_architecture comments that "Website architecture has the potential to be a term used for the intellectual discipline of organizing website content". But is this correct? - and is "Architecture" itself an intellectual discipline or a practical skill? I guess it is the latter but a good number of books have been published on the "Theory of Architecture" (and on the "History of Architecture"). The Princeton University Wordnet includes the following in its definition of Theory: "a belief that can guide behavior - the architect has a theory that more is less"; "they killed him on the theory that dead men tell no tales" http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=theory .
Surely no one can disagree with the fact that the creators of websites (experts in web design, web technology, information architecture etc) need to have good principles on which to base their work. The point is: what should the theory be called? "Theory of web design" seems inadequate because it makes one think of aesthetics, ignoring the organisation of information, the technology of making information available and the business aspects of web publishing.

[Tom]

Princeton might be interested to learn that what Mies van der Rohe actually said is 'less is more'. The converse ('more is less') has a similar meaning but is less pithy - even a little gross!