It's a brokerage house of visual authority with scant assets of its own. It's here that design links most clearly, by the way, to emblem making. It's a commonplace about the web that it complicates notions of authorship. It complicates such notions not for the web alone, however, but for design in any realm. The ascription of visual style to action, event, story can never be a mere visual act, but rather is rhetorical, directed to an end or ends.
Web refers to weaving, as text textus does as well.
A work is woven within itself, but surely also out of the world that gave rise to it. There's a look and a feel to a site. A pace, a distribution of way stations, a procession of densities. An attitude about charity to the user. These have always been present in the codex book.