What has creating a website done for me?

So you have decided to make a website!

Not so fast, you have to gather the ingredients first!

Click on the next ingredient on your shopping list to begin your quest to find it. Return home to your study with each one and throw them each in the cauldron to brew your perfect website.

2018

I had recently discovered the playwright/composer Dave Malloy. After I had consumed all of his work that was readily available, I was directed towards his website, where he uploads demo tracks and recordings of his previous shows which never got official albums.

The background was an obnoxious blue (his favorite color, he’s red/green colorblind) and the icons all hand-drawn and badly scanned. It was filled with little quips, pieces of writing, art, and hidden jokes if you clicked in just the right places. It does not in the slightest look like what you expect the official site of a Broadway composer to look like.

That was the first time it had ever crossed my mind that a website was something a person made, not just manufactured. His charmingly ugly “totally 90’s” (his words) site was something he was proud of, and created himself to reflect his personality. It was a whole new world for me, like uncovering something that had been hidden right under my feet this whole time. But I was still an outside observer, websites were something that people who were good at coding made, and I wasn’t one.

2022

I made a friend.

We met through media archiving, and that was what we mainly talked about. One of those old-school nerds that make up the backbone of the internet, a serial editor of wikipedia and imdb and constant uploader of old forgotten media to his internet archive page.

In my eyes this was the coolest thing in the world. I wanted to be him so badly.

He taught me how to use some of wikipedia’s basic source editing, things that you couldn’t easily do in the text editor. We worked side-by-side on our own wiki (this was before I knew Fandom sucks) and the opportunity for obsessive organization latched onto my brain.

At some point, I looked up his username elsewhere. I found a few personal homepages, built on things like wordpress. But alongside these were his true passion, monuments to organization, to accessibility of information, and to his own interests. The sites that had the most work put into them were not about himself, they were their own insulated wikis and likely the only place where much of this information had been documented in one place in such a dedicated way.

I have things I love to talk about, I have my own obsessive private collections of thoughts, links, media that I’m an expert in. Suddenly these holy centers of information were no longer things that just mysteriously got started, updated, hosted by some vague entity. They were made by people, people I could know, people I could be.

2023

I watched a friend disassemble his site.

Dismember it, gut it, break it down into its bare essentials.

When I first new him, his site was a rendering of a study, the different objects and art on the walls all leading to different pages and portfolio categories. According to him, not having all the text on his home page was hurting his search engine optimization.

As an artist, he was frustrated by the lack of eyes on his work and opportunities he was getting. So he decided he needed a change.

So I watched him take it apart, break it down to a much simpler, though still clearly old-school and handmade, portfolio site.

I didn’t tell him how upset it made me. It was his site, I know he had his own frustration he was going through and mine wasn’t going to help.

But I mourned the loss of even just one little site that made the internet that much more interesting. It’s stupid, and it sucks, that we feel the need to sacrifice our personal expression in the name of appeasing some almighty algorithm.

That someone decided the internet would be better if it all looked the same, same social media sites with white/grey/black backgrounds and perfectly smooth minimalist aesthetics to appeal the common denominator.

And I thought well, screw it. If this simple act of stripping down a cool site like that has such an effect on me, imagine how much impact the alternative would have.

Time to fill that void, rebel against the forces that made him feel like he had to change. I’ll respect his decision, and put that energy into a new project of my own instead.

And if it was ugly as shit, all the better to revel in dismantling the idea that everything online should be so clean and pretty. I had a plan, now. I had the motivation.

CONGRADULATIONS

I applaud your success!

Hopefully my words of experience will be of some value to you along your website journey.

Farewell, I hope you enjoyed my little game! Now go forth and make your OWN site :)