One day I decided that it was far past time for me to learn HTML; after finding a page listing basic HTML tags, I started off by converting some of the FAQs and documents I maintain into a webulated form and making a basic "personal vanity page" to wrap around them. Not that the world was suffering from a shortage of personal vanity pages even back then, but it was a good way to learn web design and the web was mature enough that it provided a faster and more convenient way for people to retrieve information.

It wasn't like handling document requests back then was that great a burden--rarely was I emailing out more than a couple per day, but obviously a webpage was more convenient (and immediate) because not only did requests for emailed copies stop, but hits on the pages were much greater than the number of email requests had been.

It's an evolutionary thing--or, perhaps, an addictive thing--you add something here, make a change there, and so forth, and see how it affects traffic and usage on your site. I don't have any sophisticated counters or analysis software, but I notice jumps in log file activity or a burst of activity coming from a site I hadn't seen before (sometimes I find out about news coverage or an article I might not otherwise have known about that way).

Sometimes I'll track down what's going on with accesses that look odd, which can turn out to be pretty funny, like when somebody's using a photo from my site in their "profile" on a chatroom, and occasionally a hit from a search engine will just strike me as amusing enough to be worth adding to the page I have of bizarre search engine hits.

Most of the time, though, I just make note of jumps in activity and check for errors. A typical day's log runs between half a megabyte and one-and-a-half, which isn't all that huge by any means, but for "yet another personal vanity page," I think that's decent enough.

Nowadays, even though it is a personal vanity page, I often think of it as promoting a product--it's just that the "product" in question happens to be me. It can be a little challenging, trying to think of it more from the audience's perspective, and there are always those moments when I feel silly and/or self-conscious and struggle with that a bit before adding new material. But I figure it's a non-confrontational medium; I'm not forcing anyone to wade through my pages if they don't want to.

One off-the-net "personal web experience" that stands out in my mind happened a few months ago when I was in a shopping mall at a crowded moment, waiting about six people deep to get checked out, and the woman ahead of me turned and said, out of the blue, "I really liked your website" and asked me about some of the photography techniques I'd used and all that. Now, talking to people in malls and stores isn't unusual--I probably get recognized by somebody who asks me something or strikes up a conversation about half the time I'm out in public--but what I realized maybe twenty minutes afterwards was that she'd never asked anything like, "hey, aren't you...?" She'd just started asking me about my website from the get-go (and I was there by myself, so it wasn't like she could have overheard me talking about it or anything). Left me scratching my head a little, but it was cool; I figure it's a good sign and an indication of how much the web and the net in general have become part of people's daily lives rather than the "geeks only" preserves they had been for so long.

If you want to tell your story and have it posted here email it to me.

Read Other First Web Page Building Adventures