…what kind of building would it be?

• An office, a factory, a shop?
• A house, an apartment, a farmhouse?
• A palace, a shack, a chicken coop?
• Perhaps a workshop, a crafting room, a studio?
• Or even a garden, a park, a forest?

There was a time when we thought of
websites as places; places where we would spend some time, wandering
about and exploring. As a proud elder blogger, I was around during that
time, and my site designs reflect that.

Now we seem to think
of websites more like billboards — something we must grasp quickly as
we drive by. A website must grab our attention immediately, above the
fold, because we won’t stay long.

As personal bloggers, or keepers of online diaries and journals, we can ignore some of this advice. We can make our online space our home space, with the comforts and entertainments we like to offer our guests (and ourselves.)

I think . . .

. . . a website is
like a building, a place; and so, we do need to pay attention to the
limits such a building presents. A website accessed with a new, fast
computer
on a broadband connection can be a big place; a website accessed with
an old, slow computer on dial-up is, by necessity, a small place.

Thus, the advantage of rooms = pages. If you have this feature on your
blogging platform (TypePad and WordPress both offer this) you can offer
more high-bandwith content, as it needs to be downloaded only a bit at a time.

Or, you can make a second (and a third…) blog, and link to it to
give your visitors what you want to provide without stuffing your rooms
so full that your guests can’t squeeze into them.

My blog (Watermark) is my house; my homesite, my home. And it
is like my house: small, but with several rooms; plain white walls; and
cluttered with poetry, pictures, toys and critters. It’s not a place
you can capture in one quick visit. It requires some time, a cup of
tea, a chocolate truffle, a practiced curiousity, to get the sense of
it.

This blog is more like a library. A children’s library, perhaps. You
can dash into a library to get a specific book, and dash out again as
soon as you have it; or you can spend the afternoon browsing in the
stacks.

Related posts here:

Personal Blogging|Blogging for the love of it

Related posts elsewhere:

The Personal Side of Personal Blog Design

Digging in the Dirt