I originally started this website in 2019 as a place to share my hobbies online. The site has seen a couple of iterations since then, but in all honesty, I’ve never used it as intended.
I think initially I was too precious about the content being perfect. I wanted everything to be structured and polished to perfection and that meant posting anything there became a bit of a chore, so I barely did anything.
I then came across a hobby store that was closing down and took the opportunity to buy out all their remaining stock at a bargain price (I can be rather impulsive). At this point the website turned into an online store for a few years to help sell the products. As before, I wanted everything to be perfect, which just prevented me from getting on with adding products to the site and marketing it. Eventually the site encountered a couple of technical issues and, rather than fix them, I just pulled the plug.
Which leads to where we are today. I’ve been watching a few videos recently about the revival of the indie web, the Y2K asthetic, Frutiger Aero design and generally a lot of nostalgia from my years of growing up online. One thing led to another (including a desire to stop scrolling on Youtube shorts every time I had a gap in activity) and I ended up browsing some sites made on Neocities.
For those of you that haven’t come across it yet, Neocities is effectively a spiritual successor to GeoCities and was set up to bring back some of the individuality and fun that defined the early internet. Honestly, I recommend you check some of these sites out. A good place to start is the “Featured Sites” section on the Neocities home page which lists a handful of randomly selected sites to peruse.
Anyway, it was looking through some of these sites that gave me the inspiration to give this another go.
By modern design/UX/UI standards, most of the websites on Neocities are abominations. And that’s what kept me hooked. Maybe some of it was nostalgia for the old web, when browsing was a purposeful activity and a pastime that required paying attention and working out where you wanted to click next. Nothing is standardised here. It’s a no holds barred free for all where creativity and fun are the hall marks of a good website.
On top of that, the content on these websites is genuine. It’s people from all around the world sharing the things they create, their thoughts and opinions. They don’t care about spell checkers. They’re not worrying about converting every image to Webp format and optimising for search engines. They just say what they want to say, share what they want to share and release it to the world, warts and all.
So that’s what I’m going to do here. This website is more about the doing than the presentation, so to start with I’ve opted for an old, basic WordPress theme (it’s not even mobile responsive!). Once I’ve got some content in place and caught up on a couple of projects I’ll build a new theme that puts the fun back into functional.
That’s enough rambling for now. I hope you stick around and enjoy my ramblings 🙂
