Nov092023: Website

“I think I’ve never detailed your website until now, it is incredibly organized! As an artist who knows only the basics of programming and creating webpages, but is very interested in having one, may I ask, what site hosting do you use? or which one do you recommend? i don’t really know anything about that. I would love to see the resurgence of the personal website/ blog.”

Thank you!! My website and the infrastructure I’ve built surrounding it is my pride and joy! More and more lately I’ve come to appreciate the security it’s given during these trying internet times.

I use WordPress and a drag-and-drop builder called Live Composer (I wouldn’t recommend it over its competitor, only because Live Composer has very bad documentation). My hosting is SiteGround. All those tools are stuff I adopted 10 years ago, since I started The World in Deeper Inspection. This way of using WordPress – being accessible but labyrinthe and too-much – suits me, probably because my personality is like this too.

But a lot of people want something simpler. I’d recommend pursuing resources from MelonLand, The Cheapskate’s Guide and Sadgrl to get started. They are more for static site generation, of the neocities type. And in their simplicity, they offer you more control compared to my set-up. They are also part of a movement called the Indie Web or Retro Web, which I consider myself a part of mentally and spiritually, if not fully. These are folks who are bringing back blogs, webrings, web surfing, and all the ways that made the internet fun and fresh back then.

If my website seems super organised, it’s less about the tools used and more due to the thinking I have developed for it – coming up with an approach of how I want to be presented online, imagining my ideal site experience and implementing it, as well as solving the problem of having both a Professional Site + a Casual Personal Online Home under the same URL. Here’s a blog post I made recently about A Personal Website VS A Portfolio, and an older post, Site Revamp + Artist Sites Should Be More Fun Maybe?, that describes my website/internet philosophies. From those two, the main point to take away is that establishing the landing page as a signpost that allows the visitor to choose their destination solved basically my problem of profesional/personal separation.

TLDR I have a lot of thoughts about making artist websites and returning to the independent web!! This has been a 3 years journey for me!