Originally Written 03 Oct 2003

The Internet is one of the vastest communications system ever created in the history of mankind. The World Wide Web is an increasingly formidable information tool that easily rivals libraries, news papers, magazines, and other forms of publications. The Internet is so popular, in fact, that people have been building web pages of their own for years to use as a forum to express their interests, views, and opinions. Personal web sites can be a very useful tool to those that develop and visit them. However, quite a few people see personal web sites and blogs as a waste of bandwidth and a totally useless aspect of the World Wide Web. Their waste, at times, might out weigh their usefulness but personal web sites and homepages are a very important part of the World Wide Web.

Personal web sites can be used to communicate with others. As a matter of fact, blogs tend to be one of the best forms of public journals. Static web pages and frequently updated personal web sites and homepages can tell the story of one’s life quite well. John Doe’s life might not be that interesting to everyone in the world but to a handful of people it is. John Doe is also educating himself in the process of maintaining his web site. HTML isn’t the most natural language in the world but it is definitely one of the easiest to learn. When you start mixing Java, PHP, Perl, ASP, and other true programming languages into the mix someone can learn quite a bit just by developing a web site of their own. Building that web site also allows John Doe to have a globally accessible billboard of sorts that he could use to publish poems, music, stories, and even articles such as this. These are all great things can truly make someone want to get out and start building their web site.

Most personal web sites don’t tend to succeed or become even remotely popular due to the fact that the developer gets bored with the personal web site and slows his updates or stops updating the web site completely. In the case of the Short Family Web Site, this is the second attempt to develop one since Chris and Carri Short have been married. The first web site was designed to be huge and popular but development of it was time consuming and that time was better used elsewhere. However, this version of the current version of the Short Family Web Site was well planned and designed to be simplistic in nature and incredibly easy to add content to. This is another reason that a lot of personal web sites fail miserably, poor planning and design. When someone sits down to design a web site they should have a purpose in building that web site other than to say, “I have a web site.” Proper planning and efficient designing can significantly cut the time it takes to build a personal web site.

Another often overlooked yet vital purpose of personal web sites is linking. The World Wide Web wouldn’t exist if web sites didn’t link to each other. Personal web sites often include a large number of links to other web sites which link to other web sites and so on and so forth. Linking is what glues the World Wide Web together. Web sites that don’t link to other web sites can be popular but really go against the ideals of the World Wide Web.

The Short Family Web Site does things very differently than other personal and family web sites. Research, marketing, search engine optimization and promotion are all key factors in the success of Carri and I’s personal web site. Ever article written is researched before hand. Ads and products are strategically placed throughout the web site to market other web sites while marketing our web site to others. All the pages on our web site are optimized for search engines to help improve the page’s popularity thus improving the popularity of the web site. Even with all these efforts, the biggest attributor to the success of the Short Family Web Site is that it has content and lots of it. A web site without content is as good as a book without words. Personal web sites without content are equally useless. With our web site one of the goals is to let people know who we are, what we do, and how we live. But, that makes for a very bland web site. With additional content and other resourceful information making up the bulk of the web site it becomes quite clear that personal web sites that set out to be more than just personal web sites are easily built and can be very popular.

Personal web sites are here to stay. Just look at the Open Directory Project category for Personal Homepages to get an idea of their popularity. The need for them isn’t great and most of the time they are dead projects after a year. However, the pros of personal web sites can easily out weigh the cons. Personal web sites can be made useful to the world if the developer devotes enough time into the web site. Personal web sites can be profitable, meaningful, and useful additions to the greatest information resource on the planet.