Has your motivation changed over time?
Absolutely. By far the biggest influence (and motivator) is seeing
how readers respond. Besides obvious indications like people
writing in to say what they liked or ask to see more of something,
I do keep an eye on the log files, not just to watch for any errors
or problems, but to watch for overall changes in traffic patterns,
what people are looking for or where they're coming from, what
they're looking at when bookmarking the site, etc.
Trying to figure out what individual readers do would be impractical, but you can tell when there's a sudden increase in activity on a particular page or group of pages or when a large number of visitors are coming in a particular way such as when a pointer to a page appears on a high-traffic message board or mailing list.
Sometimes I'll notice that a lot of people are coming to my site looking for the same thing but not finding it--and I'll try to come up with what they are looking for or at least a pointer to a place that does have it. A good example was adding the "Trygve Directory" after noticing that a lot of readers were hitting my site who were looking for people, either contemporary or historical, who were named "Trygve" but who nonetheless weren't me.
"Trygve Lie," for example, was the first secretary-general of the UN and lots of people are looking for background information on him. After "Trygve Haavelmo," winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in economics, died in 1999, I saw a lot of people hitting my site who were searching on his name (or a near misspelling thereof). So, I put in at least a pointer to a site where people could find the information they were looking for even if it wasn't on my own site.
The immediacy of the web is one of the most gratifying aspects of running a webpage. Writing a magazine article, technical paper, or a book is a long and time-consuming process and it may be many months before you get any kind of response or feedback about it.
In contrast, the web works much more quickly, and if you do something that people like, you may see hundreds or thousands of additional hits or bookmarks per day within the week.
Do your friends and family know you keep this site/read it? If so have you had any really negative experiences as a result? If not why?
I have a few friends who regularly check out my website. If
nothing else, there's usually something new to tease me about on
it, but most people I've known for years are still "going to get
around to checking out my website someday" or at most have just
pulled up the index page, shrugged, and gone on with their lives
without ever looking at anything else. Pretty much the only way
anybody in my family checks any of it out is if I happen to be
over at one of their houses and pull a page up specifically to
point something out to them.
What are your favorite things on your site?
When I come up with anything new that works out some way that
I'm happy with, that'll be my favorite thing for about a week,
and then it'll be something I'd done since. Much of the time,
it's not anything that anyone else noticed and, once in a while,
it'll even be something that hardly anybody else likes.
I think that just goes with any kind of "performance art." I'm the worst person in the world for judging what I do objectively, whether it's on stage, screen, print, CD, or the web--so sometimes I have to forcibly push aside my personal reactions to what I do and pay attention to how other people see it.
When looking at other people's Web sites what do you look for as a viewer?
Depends; most of the time, I'm looking for specific information or
content, so I like being able to find what I'm looking for efficiently.
Some days, though, I'll settle for any page if it has working links,
graphics that aren't broken or at least have ALT tags, and pages that
aren't all "Under Construction" or "Coming Soon."
More recently, I've started looking at sites with more of an eye towards the presentation of information apart from the information itself, as much as anything with the intent of getting some ideas for presenting written work with a style and structure to complement the content.
I haven't really pursued that aspect of web design that much, in part because when something catches my eye, it's usually because I hate it and wouldn't want to emulate it in any way--or because it's so good that it's almost intimidating and I can sit back and appreciate it, but feel like I wouldn't know where to begin to develop that kind of mental vision for imagining that kind of artwork, let alone attempt to carve its like out of my own rough-hewn HTML.