Why make a website?
I got my first laptop when I was around 6 years old. It was a clunky Lenovo that ran Windows XP and took about 3 minutes to boot up, but to me that wasn’t important. What was important was its ability to connect to the internet.
Like most kids my age, I mostly used the internet to play Flash games, research stuff for school assignments, and play Flash games while pretending to research stuff for school assignments. However, I would occasionally stumble upon websites with some niche theme or subject, with perhaps less-than-professional design but a passion for sharing their interests or creations with the world.
For context, I started browsing the Web around 2010 or so. This is significant, since the late 2000s and the early 2010s were the last hurrah of independent, non-commercial websites dominating the Internet. By ‘independent’, I mostly mean the kinds of websites run by some guy in their basement out of sheer love and dedication to whatever their website was about. Gradually I witnessed the disappearance of these websites and the rise of large, commercial social media/hosting companies that supplanted them. I don’t need to tell you about the issues with relying exclusively on large commercial tech companies; various scandals that plague them have made the news often enough.
Websites run by these companies tend to be much slicker on the surface, but their bloated performance and their privacy invasions have made me rather cynical of using them when I don’t absolutely have to. Making a website from scratch is much more ‘pure’, for lack of a better word. I can make a website that just serves the content I intend it to, without having it stuffed full of nonsense like analytics and advertising. I also wanted to pay a sort of tribute to the websites of old, those that were run without any sort of motive other than the desire to share interests, hobbies, and cool information.
Another part I enjoy about creating my own website is the ability to design it how I wish. Now, to play devil’s advocate, this freedom with website design has resulted in a lot of ‘GRAPHIC DESIGN IS MY PASSION’-type homepages. But I would argue that this is far more interesting and engaging than the same Material Design pages consisting of 2-3 colors, AI-generated writing, and generic stock images that clog up the modern Web. Creating my own website allowed me to play around with the kind of colors, backgrounds, and aesthetics I enjoy.
It also challenged me to rediscover programming in HTML/CSS. My degree doesn’t involve a lot of messing around with computers or software, despite this being an interest of mine. By creating this website, I was able to dust off previous high school experience in website development, experience that would have otherwise been lost had I just used social media posts or Weebly.