If I told you that websites don't really exist any more, you'd probably look at me like I was crazy1. "There's literally billions of websites!", you'd probably exclaim as you pull out your smartphone to show me that the Internet hasn't imploded in the last handful of minutes2, and that the billions of websites are still there doing whatever it is that they do.
But, the challenge is to find a site that's not a blog of some kind. To find a site that's not a series of posts in reverse-chronological order. That's a lot tougher3.
When I'm browsing around on the Intenret these days, I find that I run across two main kinds of sites: blogs and applications.
I'm sure that most people are familiar with blogs. They're the aforementioned 'websites' that consist of an index page that's a frequently updated list of short, informal posts (and sometimes longer posts) organized into reverse-chronological order such that the newest one is on top. Which lets frequent visitors see your most recent drivel without having to spend much effort, and if they want to go through your archive, they can just keep scrolling down and paging through your old posts until they get to the end of your archive or they pass out from boredom. There's the added benefit that if you wrote a multi-part essay about Renaissance artisan widget making, people who are trolling through your archive are going to read the last part first and be very confused. It's a win-win4.
The other kind of site you'll likely run across is an application. This is a site that hosts a database that you query, or lets you play a game in your browser, or edit a document, or send an email, or let you search through the print archives of your local newspaper, or access your bank account, or something like that. It's a website that should probably be a program that runs on your computer, if people these days ran programs other than web browsers on their computers.
But there's a third kind of site that's kind of been tossed by the wayside, and that's the kind of site that's a collection of documents, arranged logically (or not, depending on the webmaster), and presented as a single thing. In short, a website.
"But," I hear you start to say, "surely anything that exists on the Internet and you can get to with a web browser is a website." Which is almost right, but also mostly wrong. Look up any definition of 'website' that you want, and you're going to end up with some variation of:
"A group of World Wide Web pages usually containing hyperlinks to each other and made available online by an individual, company, educational institution, government, or organization." --Merriam-Webster
So, all those 'sites' where you play games or watch movies or send emails or make memes or whatever, aren't really websites. They're web applications.
Blogs are almost websites, since they do appear to be a collection of pages with hyperlinks and et cetera, but those are also web applications. I'd even go so far as to say that if your website only exists as records in a relational database, then your website isn't really a website, either. It's a web application, too5.
I get it. Traditional websites aren't exciting6, and they don't show how clever you are as a programmer7. And, sure, you can dress up your content any way you want, but the difference between a blog and a website is kind of like the difference between someone's journal8,9 versus reading a magazine or a book. They all have their place, sure, and it can be fine to read the random scribblings on whatever subject took root in the author's head that day10, but sometimes it's also nice to have a more complete and thoughtful experience once in a while.