Website-Building Reflection

The process of constructing my website was extremely frustrating, yet in the end, it was rewarding. There are ways in which this process reminded me of when I was designing clothes and costumes for punks, Goths, musicians, drag queens and kings, strippers, and actors. Moments of enraging frustration when a vision couldn’t be realized alternating with moments of great elation when the unrealized vision morphed into something else.

Part of the frustration was that I basically had to teach myself how to use Dreamweaver to build the site because I chose to use the site I started during a workshop I took a couple of years ago. I actually ended up spending close to 20 hours working on the site, which is way more than I should have spent, and I’m not done yet. I don’t ever feel that my writing is quite finished; I suppose I’ll feel the same way about the site. The satisfaction came in part from seeing a concrete artifact that didn’t exist before I started working. As someone who teaches writing and who studies literature and feminism, I don’t often see concrete things that I’ve created, except for texts. Certainly most of my creative work is private.

The completely public nature of the web has forced me to consider audience in a way that I haven’t had to in a long time. For years now, my audience has been limited—those reading literary journals, my professors, some academics at conferences, and a few of my peers. The appropriate boundaries have been quite clear. But I rarely have been so self-conscious about my public image since I left the business world 8 years ago.

I think working on this project helped to crystallize for me the importance of document design and white space. I became much more conscious of the way that white space and words interact on a page. I’ve read that people have negative physiological reactions when they encounter paragraphs of over 300-500 words; my experience with my first bio page confirmed that. It made me uncomfortable. I really cut it down. I started out with a personal statement I’d composed for grad school applications, but I realized that it was too long and that it disclosed more than I’d want my students to know about me. Again I come back to my consciousness of the way that a webpage open me to the public gaze.

Working with webpages is very different from working with pages. I became more conscious that I’m from a different generation than my students. The fact is, the unbroken pagination of webpages is a little disorienting to me, and I suppose that my students take that for granted. I even word process in the print view because I like to see pages. I have begun to wonder whether this technology might not change the way we interact with pages. Might our children’s children’s children not become uncomfortable with the brokenness of discrete pages in the same way I get uncomfortable when paragraphs are “too long”?

I’ve also been thinking about how different generational attitudes toward personal privacy are becoming. Young people seem to me to live very public lives—My Space, Facebook, Girls Gone Wild. I doubt very much that someone with a My Space page would feel as exposed as I do having even a professional webpage. I spoke to a much younger friend about my discomfort with the blog at the beginning of the semester. He didn’t understand it. He keeps a blog diary! I can’t imagine doing that. He can’t understand my reluctance. In a strange and roundabout way, I think that maybe the most important lesson I learned from constructing the website was that the even though my students and I live in the same country, at the same historical moment, we live in very different cultures.