I’m writing this first paragraph in June of 2021, at work, on a slow day with not much else to do at the office – a perfect time to start digging on my website garden. For the last couple of days, I’ve started to think more about my plans to make a personal website that is not centered around my work as a graphic designer. I’ve re-watched Home Page (a wonderful documentary about early web culture) and surfed Gossip’s Web (a directory of handmade websites), and in a sense I’ve rediscovered my love for the handmade/personal/thoughtful web.
This website will not be a particularly standard one (disregarding the question of what that really means for now), so a good way to start planning is to just write about how I imagine it. This text will probably live on one of the sub pages when I get started, as what could be described as a devlog, but for now, it’s all there is to this site.
The structure of the garden is not the easiest nut to crack. I’m not exactly sure about what kind of stuff I will be publishing and how to keep the site fun to explore but to also keep it from feeling overwhelming. I’m fairly certain that I will have a part of the garden be pretty text-based, a place to write about web culture, art and design, but also about my personal life. I'm also going to put experimental mini sites somewhere, and more abstract forms of graphic design. But is it good to keep everything organized in categories or should everything be linked in some way?
Earlier thoughts was to make a table-of-content-based navigation system, where pages would link to one another and make the site an exciting mess to surf. It’s still a very good idea that I’d like to incorporate somehow, but I doubt it would be easy and fun to maintain this system for all of the pages. However, the more text-heavy part could very well be structured in this fashion.