personal sites

[helenic]

Today, with the help of romauld, who is now kindly hosting me, I bought two new domains: fox-fires.org and wax-and-wane.org. (No links because, as yet, no content.) art-fag.net expired last week (which is why all my links are broken) because I tried to renew it, but couldn't remember my password, and the password email I requested never arrived. That domain has now been Evilled by my old registrar; that is, they've made it unusable for a year unless I pay them £200 to renew it because I didn't renew it before it expired. I hadn't updated the site since last April in any case, and I've had it for over four years, so. Time for something new. Wax-and-wane because the moon is significant for me, for various reasons, because it has overtones of transience and flux and I'm in a state of perpetual moodswing, but at the same time never really feeling like I change. It has various attractive symbolisms, the phrase is pleasing, it's a Cocteau Twins song. I think I'm going to use it for my art, semi-professionally. Fox-fires is a contraction of another Cocteau Twins song (what can I say; they have very pleasing lyrics, and all the other things I came up with were taken), "Frou-frou foxes in midsummer fires". It is also a cunning inversion of PhyrePhoxx, which was my first ever username on Yahoo in about 1996.

It's all got me thinking about websites again. The personal site is a strange genre. Perhaps it's just the ones I've seen, but it seems to be that they are all owned by photography students from Scandinavia, and the layouts are always the same: white page, large rectangular photograph (of the edge of a building, or trees, or someone's legs, usually) with links in a random serif font underneath the picture. Or else they're scrapbook style with scannings-in and handwriting and things cut out of magazines. I'm not trying to be insulting - a lot of them are very well executed and very aesthetically pleasing - but there's no denying the extent to which these things follow trends. I know I've been guilty of it as well, probably more than all the efforts I've (obliquely) described above. But there's something simultaneously depressing and compelling about it, like badly-written escapist fantasy novels. On one level they are pleasing, an enjoyable waste of time, and "inspiring" in the sense of giving you dead-end ideas that can't be developed further, or aesthetic but largely meaningless lyricism, or an idea you'd seen somewhere before but had forgotten. No real change, nothing really new or affecting, but a small kind of nostalgia. Taking comfort in the familiar. Moods you've already had, that sort of thing.

I used to be a bit addicted to these sort of sites, but I haven't browsed the usual suspects in almost a year now, just as I'd left my own domain untouched for so long I'd almost forgotten I had it, and largely used the space for storing livejournal images. I do want to have an online presence again (why? I don't know; suggestions on a postcard plz) but I'm at a bit of a loss about what, precisely, to do with it. I've always wavered between actually putting my abortive and talent-lacking creative endeavours online in the hope of getting vapid compliments, and between being defensively abstract and just putting up a string of paragraphs that chronicle my preoccupations at the time, and try to articulate some of my thinking about things like identity and environment. I want to change tack, but am unsure how, so because this is livejournal I'll ask your opinion rather than, you know, being original and thinking for myself.



[Poll #428405]

Comments

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

How important are original artwork/layout design?

Textbox was too small to explain. I'm more bothered about design and layout in the sense of providing a site that is readable and easy to use (no blue on blue text, no silly popups, no stupid "iframes" etc), than whether it looks artistic or not. And I don't care about originality at all. I'd rather people copy the design of sites which work; people who try to be original usually make their sites impossible to use.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

really? I suppose I've just seen a very different segment of the market. The sites I mentioned above in my comment to mijra are the kind of thing I mean by "original design". And I like cunning links and things. Also small popups are fun, but only when you click on a link instead of taking you to a new page, rather than automatic popups which I agree are annoying. And why use iframes when you can use divs with position: absolute?

[matt13.livejournal.com]

I like sites that are artistic (interesting photographs as backgrounds/borders, original colour schemes -- not blue!) and make good use of available technology without abusing it (i.e. use a structured HTML document, with as much CSS as is wanted to achieve the artistic effect, without putting everything in a popup window and relying heavily on javascript). Some content is good too, even if it just says a little about the owner of the site.

Sites with too many cunning links can be annoying -- I can't easily see where to click, or where I'm going to be taken. I suppose I also look at a different sector of sites to you, I tend to find more technical sites, generally with the boring blue and light blue colour scheme.

I haven't taken the time to make my own site (http://matt.blissett.me.uk/) artistic, that would mean a lot of time and effort (I'm certainly not a natural artist) which I can't spare at the moment. I want to take the pictures myself, so it will also have to wait until I have a camera. At the moment it has to stick with being functional, when I can think of a suitable domain I'll be less selective in it's content (the current domain, my name, is too restrictive. I want an anonymous domain for the next site).

CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) generally impresses me, mainly because I appreciate the work that's gone in to each design: having used CSS in reasonably innovative ways myself, I can appreciate the massive effort that's gone in to each design, though I can't appreciate the graphics in the same way.