For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website
YES -> For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website
Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a lot more bored.
Part of the appeal of the internet when I was young was making your own website. I taught myself HTML as a tween to facilitate that desire (I made a website about Sailor Saturn from Sailor Moon.). Free web hosting on sites like Angelfire or Geocities was abundant, and you could waste an entire day just looking at the dumb things people put online. Just take a look at the Geocities Gallery—people made websites about their favorite animals, their life experiences, or celebrities they loved, and I devoured all of these things with equal enthusiasm. This website is just a list of links that a guy named Dave likes! This person from Texas wanted to mail people giallo movies on VHS! This is literally just pictures of North Vietnam, taken by a person from South Vietnam who now lives in America!
If you could figure out how to host your own website, you’d have even more freedom over the design and the content. Other than LiveJournal, this was my first introduction to the power of fandom. Ohtori.nu was a website maintained by diehard Utena fans and included scanned animation cells, critical analysis and their own translation of scripts. The fact that the site is still up and still hosting mostly the same material is a testament to the small group of people who made and maintained it.
Social media erased the need to build a website to express yourself online. Sure, early social media like MySpace allowed for you to radically change the look and feel of your page—adding music and changing the background—but ultimately, it was still a MySpace page, with a comment wall and your top eight friends. On top of that, MySpace had total ownership of that page, meaning when the site was bought and sold, individual users had no say in the changes. By 2019, you couldn’t even look at your old MySpace accounts anymore because they lost all the data from prior to 2016.
I know “having your own website” can sound daunting, or nerdy, or weird or a cost or even just another chore. But it’s purely about ownership and options. The deep irony is that it seems like the more un-sexy website are…the easier they are to create. From the ridiculous to the simple to the bundled to the legacy to the traditional to the bloggy to the nerdy and more – it’s more free and more straightforward than ever.
