Today I wanna talk about main purposes of a personal website.
Now let`s think, what for do people need their personal webpage? Here we can remember social networks, personal blogs, community forums, CV`s, portfolio and simple homepages.
In common, I`d say people need to express their feelings and emotions, share some personal pictures and clips, communicate with friends and colleagues.
Look on verbs: express, share and communicate. Paraphrasing these three actions, we can say that people need to show the produced information, and take the public response on it. That`s it – “to show and to accept response”.
Now let`s concentrate on this conclusion, and try to look on some popular web projects from this very point of view.
Of course, we all know, Facebook – the world`s largest social network (excluding china sector), that provides hundreds of personal services, widgets and games, search services, friend`s communities, music, picture and video shares and many other ideas of web life. Someone can say that Facebook do has everything people need in internet. Let it be…
Live Journal – the alive network, widespread all over the world. Service which allows everyone to write there own blog, make friends, share some pictures, ideas, emotions and etc.
We can now remember much more social projects, analyze them, make decisions on what is good and what is bad on this or that one, compare and choose the best, but…
But at the beginning of this discussion I asked the question: “What`s the main purpose of a personal webpage?”
Now look at all these social networks, they all fight for registered users, advertise new services and even pay money for a popularity of your account in one or another way. In other words, each service is doing everything that you remain inside. What is the result of this battle?
We can see hundreds of similar projects, most of them tried to repeat some other site success, but retreat. None of them wants to concentrate on their own ideas and quality, and nobody tries to invent something new.
We have thousands of companies and services, making unnecessary personal sites with a copy of some popular features; we have thousands of users of these services, paying money for nothing really good; and we have only a few interesting and innovative personal services per year.
Is this horrible?
Sure no, this is life, this is choice.
Not every user really wants something extraordinary, not even one tenth do. But whom do we all know, who made those several innovative projects every year?
They are people who do not afraid to spend time on the thinking, analyzing and exploring. They try, mistake, restart, mistake again, but never retreat.
That`s great, yeah.
As you see, I touched not only personal web pages, it`s only an example. I have no answer for everyone which way to choose, no answer for a decision what to make with your sites, but I have one simple answer on the question what to do the first:
please think, is it worth making another copy of that service?
sitko-ru
18/04/2009 в 10:57
No man, its not worth it. We’ve reached over-capacity in this.
20/04/2009 в 07:45
Зачем на английском то?
Ну а в целом – пустая запись. Много слов, а ничего толком не сказано.
20/04/2009 в 08:57
2 necrosavant:
ага, just emotions..
20/04/2009 в 10:30
Всё равно непонятно, зачем на английском.
20/04/2009 в 15:58
а почему бы и нет
21/04/2009 в 07:42
Где версия для русскоговорящего большинства?
21/04/2009 в 08:26
Ну, хотя бы потому что аудитория этого блога русскоязычная. И ты сам говоришь на русском.
Я не видел, чтобы в англоязычных блогах писали на арабском.
21/04/2009 в 08:31
Предлагаю сменить название поста на “учусь выращивать цветы”
//Дима, материться не хорошо.
21/04/2009 в 17:03
2 necrosavant: вспомни историю фразы “учи албанский”
2 justnomi: если бы пост был про цветы – можно было бы наверное, а так…
21/04/2009 в 19:42
Это не ответ ;)
21/04/2009 в 20:13
2 necrosavant: может ты недопонял, я не хотел тебя обидеть, лишь привёл пример – эта история и есть пример общения на разных языках в рамках одного блога.
22/04/2009 в 07:29
Да нет, я понял, что это не попытка оскорбить ;).
Но для меня всегда оставалось загадкой, зачем люди пишут на иностранном языке в русскоязычной среде.
22/04/2009 в 08:02
Each company should choose for itself or expensive [unique project], or cheap and sample…
Что качается англоязычности, то мне кажется, что это правильная политика. Мы открыты для всех. Может даже стоит создать и англоязычную версию корпоративного сайта =)))
22/04/2009 в 12:27
И китайскую!
22/04/2009 в 13:41
ну и албанскую тогда
28/05/2009 в 23:38
hey this is a very interesting article!