Why Did I Make My Own Website?

Last Modified: Sep 1, 2024

I think it's a crime that so many websites, owned by individuals, are just advertising. Personal websites used to be an expressive medium, used by anyone and everyone to create digital pages that exuded personality and quirkiness. I learned to code in hypertext, making text adventures, and it opened up an entirely new way of making art outside of my passion for theatre, a different art that was user-centered and non-linear.

I bought my improvlaurie domain after university so that I could create an online corporate training CV. That has not ended up being my primary business, for a variety of reasons, and so over time, I stopped linking people to the site, and people just found it by accident when googling me and were a bit confused. I also found Wix embarrassing to use, because of the way that if you use it as intended, you look like a corporate parasite, and if you use it as unintended, and try to be unusual and creative, you look like an incompetent monkey in a bow tie who doesn't understand how a website works. Also, in April 2024 Wix randomly decided to hike prices on all of their plans, in some cases by 75%!!! I was like "Why the hell am I paying over £100 a year for this exploitative crap that doesn't even express who I am as a creative?"

And so, I ended up using Eleventy to build my own site. I can't reccomend that everyone use Eleventy, or a similar Static Site Generator, because while Eleventy is a simple web design framework, in the grand scheme of things, it is completely out of the technical abilities of a lot of non-STEM creatives that I know. I chose Eleventy because it gave me the greatest control possible over my site, within the skillset that I have. I still have a lot to learn about how to use it properly. For others who are interested in taking a similar path to me, but who have no coding background, I think a more beginner-friendly tool like Glitch is probably better.

So, I'm sure some people come to my site and think "Oh, no blue and grey squares around everything, no swooshy CCS animations, and no link to an 'X' account, what an unprofessional amateur website", and to those people I say: fuck you, get off my property, go and lick the boots of some snotty algorithm that tells you what you're supposed to think is cool.