Website Redesign
Mar. 16th, 2025 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elyusionHolaaaaa tout le monde! This is the entry where I explain myself and the drastic site redesign. It may or may not be up depending on how soon after posting you read this, but yea.
TLDR; Too many people have super busy sites and I wanted to be #different, plus I wanted to streamline my layout, plus I wanted something I made entirely myself, and now I hope I won't be doing anything like this again for a while. I also might get sucked into a tornado later today but it's cool.
You might also notice I seriously streamlined my links page. Worry not! The ones removed from my website will either be reposted here with the #links tag, or they were unnecessary and you won't miss them when I don't share them again. Or you'll see them again in a linkdump even further into the future... You shall see.
I was going to jokingly call myself "reactionary," but I actually looked it up and nah, that isn't what I'm doing. See, part of why I made my site like this was because of many visually busy sites I saw around, as well as this web page.
Firstly, while many maximalist sites look very cool... it's not that I'm bad at finding my way around, but I guess to a degree I feel like I shouldn't be "finding my way around." The extra fractions of seconds it takes to figure out where a link is and stuff wears me down after a night of too much web surfing. Plus, I'm not incredibly photosensitive or anything, but some of these sites are a little uncomfortable to stay on for long.
Secondly, when I happened to stumble across that web page, what I laser-focused on was the implication that people fill their sites with all sorts of nonsense to distract from their lack of (interesting) content. Rather, webmasters dangle shiny keys in front of guests as if they wouldn't pay attention otherwise. It's nice imagining people staying on my site a while, yes, but if it's not my content keeping them around then that's not making me feel great. I also read another essay about how personal sites should be for people who actually have something interesting to share rather than zoomers who are "nostalgic" for a time that was barely theirs, but that person is transphobic so I'm not linking them :p So I decided to have a site that focuses on the content, the whole content, and nothing but the content.
So I've been thinking of myself as reactionary because the new layout is a "reaction" to the visual overload-y faux-nostalgia of many sites on Neocities and Nekoweb, but I looked up what reactionary means: "1. opposing political or social progress or reform." Knowing this, it seems like those other sites are the ones that are reactionary? Since many of them seem to resent the growing amount of mobile users and other present-day web design realities. So is my site progressive? Well, not exactly, because my layout was also inspired by various sites from the mid-to-late 00s. Just not the eye-strainy annoying ones. But maybe my insistence on mobile compatibility (and basic accessibility, but I don't want to be arrogant and call my site accessible. Surely there's things I could improve) makes it progressive, I dunno.
Along with that, I also got the itch to change my layout during an indie web contest I entered. I saw how few guestbook comments I was receiving compared to other contestants, and I wondered if my layout was part of the cause. In the end, the website that won was busy visually (but not messy), so even if I had this current layout I likely wouldn't have done much better... My interests aren't popular enough and my art isn't good enough yet, probably. But even though a part of me knew a different layout wouldn't have changed my prospects much, I started seeing myself coding in my dreams and I couldn't take it anymore. So I began to change it.
Because of this and school, I've barely had time to game or draw or do anything else I like to do. So after this, I hope I don't get that webdev bug for a WHILE. I would like to create, please and thank you. I mean, designing/coding a website is creating, but no one cares to compliment my efforts on it. When I shared my site on my socials, like one person (openly) cared. My drawings are complimented more readily. And at the end of the day: I do what I do for attention. (But not for fame. There is a difference.) So I'm super glad to be done with this... and with all of spring break ahead of me too. Hell yea. Don't look at all my late assignments because all my focus was on my site.
Anyways, I very recently heard a huge storm is brewing? The tornado-y kind? And it's supposed to hit in a few hours? So we'll see how that goes! If you don't hear from me again, you know what happened.
TLDR; Too many people have super busy sites and I wanted to be #different, plus I wanted to streamline my layout, plus I wanted something I made entirely myself, and now I hope I won't be doing anything like this again for a while. I also might get sucked into a tornado later today but it's cool.
You might also notice I seriously streamlined my links page. Worry not! The ones removed from my website will either be reposted here with the #links tag, or they were unnecessary and you won't miss them when I don't share them again. Or you'll see them again in a linkdump even further into the future... You shall see.
I was going to jokingly call myself "reactionary," but I actually looked it up and nah, that isn't what I'm doing. See, part of why I made my site like this was because of many visually busy sites I saw around, as well as this web page.
Firstly, while many maximalist sites look very cool... it's not that I'm bad at finding my way around, but I guess to a degree I feel like I shouldn't be "finding my way around." The extra fractions of seconds it takes to figure out where a link is and stuff wears me down after a night of too much web surfing. Plus, I'm not incredibly photosensitive or anything, but some of these sites are a little uncomfortable to stay on for long.
Secondly, when I happened to stumble across that web page, what I laser-focused on was the implication that people fill their sites with all sorts of nonsense to distract from their lack of (interesting) content. Rather, webmasters dangle shiny keys in front of guests as if they wouldn't pay attention otherwise. It's nice imagining people staying on my site a while, yes, but if it's not my content keeping them around then that's not making me feel great. I also read another essay about how personal sites should be for people who actually have something interesting to share rather than zoomers who are "nostalgic" for a time that was barely theirs, but that person is transphobic so I'm not linking them :p So I decided to have a site that focuses on the content, the whole content, and nothing but the content.
So I've been thinking of myself as reactionary because the new layout is a "reaction" to the visual overload-y faux-nostalgia of many sites on Neocities and Nekoweb, but I looked up what reactionary means: "1. opposing political or social progress or reform." Knowing this, it seems like those other sites are the ones that are reactionary? Since many of them seem to resent the growing amount of mobile users and other present-day web design realities. So is my site progressive? Well, not exactly, because my layout was also inspired by various sites from the mid-to-late 00s. Just not the eye-strainy annoying ones. But maybe my insistence on mobile compatibility (and basic accessibility, but I don't want to be arrogant and call my site accessible. Surely there's things I could improve) makes it progressive, I dunno.
Along with that, I also got the itch to change my layout during an indie web contest I entered. I saw how few guestbook comments I was receiving compared to other contestants, and I wondered if my layout was part of the cause. In the end, the website that won was busy visually (but not messy), so even if I had this current layout I likely wouldn't have done much better... My interests aren't popular enough and my art isn't good enough yet, probably. But even though a part of me knew a different layout wouldn't have changed my prospects much, I started seeing myself coding in my dreams and I couldn't take it anymore. So I began to change it.
Because of this and school, I've barely had time to game or draw or do anything else I like to do. So after this, I hope I don't get that webdev bug for a WHILE. I would like to create, please and thank you. I mean, designing/coding a website is creating, but no one cares to compliment my efforts on it. When I shared my site on my socials, like one person (openly) cared. My drawings are complimented more readily. And at the end of the day: I do what I do for attention. (But not for fame. There is a difference.) So I'm super glad to be done with this... and with all of spring break ahead of me too. Hell yea. Don't look at all my late assignments because all my focus was on my site.
Anyways, I very recently heard a huge storm is brewing? The tornado-y kind? And it's supposed to hit in a few hours? So we'll see how that goes! If you don't hear from me again, you know what happened.
