Building a Website

Once upon a time, I had a MySpace. Like most people I know, though, I eventually dumped MySpace in favor of Facebook. The reasons for me were numerous. First and foremost, I joined Facebook because it was where my little sister was sharing photos of her family. I began receiving friend requests from random strangers, and quickly discovered the plethora of 30-50 year old men who were only friends with 20-something beautiful women. It creeped me out that people were looking for booty calls on MySpace. I was there to keep in touch with my friends and family.

But the real clincher was the simplified format. I never knew what to expect visiting someone's profile on MySpace. Some people's pages were so loaded with graphics and fancy formats that my poor little computer could barely load them. Some of the formats even made certain buttons invisible, or stretched the width of the page so far you had to scroll back and forth to read each line. What was a good concept to start off with (both the social networking utility and the ability to really personalize your page) just turned out bad.

When I had an account with Verizon, they offered a free website with their service. It had limited design options, and though I set it up, I almost never used it. I have played around with a few different websites such as Box.Net and Posterous, andI finally settled on PBWorks to create my ePortfolios.

What really draws me to one host or another is the ease of use. PBWorks, I felt, had the best format of the pages I tried. Where Posterous and Box.Net were more about just file-sharing, I like that with PBWorks I could actually put together a professional looking site, with a front page and a site-map. And then, of course, there are my blogspots.

Of the various sites suggested this week, I am choosing Google, Yola and Wordpress. Google I like because it is attached to my Gmail account. Wordpress is a host with which I am familiar, as it has it's own StumbleUpon channel. I have found so many great and interesting blogs on that site, including some sound academic work. Yola is completely new to me, but so far so good. I haven't really gotten too far with any of these pages yet, but so far they seem pretty accessible. I'll let you know when I have more to say on them.

I'd like to take a moment again to say how simply amazing it is that the internet has become so much a part of our lives. There are so many sites out there that let you just build your own blog or web page, for free, with almost no strings attached (save the ever present "Terms of Service" basically saying they own your content and you won't post anything raunchy. Oh, and the good old limited liability clause). While there is so much concern now about our complete relinquishment of privacy, the fact is that anyone now, anyone with internet access can have their 15 minutes of fame. Of course, since the internet is theoretically forever, it's probably a lot more than fifteen minutes...

Thanks for reading,
Katie May