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This Is Not A Blog contains essays, short stories and poetry by Stephen B. Starr.
Reflections on launching a static website (March 22, 2008)
I hear a common refrain among designers — we are too busy creating for others what we really need for our own businesses (the cobbler’s children go without shoes). In 1997, I launched a long overdue Flash-based web site. Flash was all the rage then and shortly after I launched it, I learned that search engines cannot manage to get inside a Flash file to index it. My site would go largely undetected. This mattered little to me at the time as my new business is primarily by referral and I saw the website as a fancy calling card.
Ten years real time is a bit more like 10 months in internet technology time. The search engine lock down on my Flash site gnawed away at the back of my mind after I launched it. “You’re not taking advantage of any of the technology available to you!” A year and a half ago, I undertook the refreshing of my own website. I was determined that search engines would eat up my html and I would get more exposure.
In the year it took me to complete the site, a static website has become a poor cousin to the dynamic, database driven, Web 2.0 sites that I am creating now for my own clients. (Everyone wants a dynamic website.) These Web 2.0 sites are a bit more like real-life interaction. They can change their minds daily (or hourly), play nicely (or not) with others, blurt out statements with little or no thought… It’s great.
And search engine optimization is on everyone’s mind. It’s all about exposure, number of clicks, length of stay on your site. Success for a website is a bit like success for a celebrity or a politician — maximum exposure. We Americans are particularly well versed in this style of clamoring to get noticed. We have come to believe that more is more. But our culture can also be cruel to those who garner exposure in large quantity. We force our politicians and celebrities to endure the glare of the spotlight until we cannot stomach them anymore and then find ways to cut them back down to size. Celebrity is not for the faint of heart.
I sense my own voice among the murmur struggling to find an economy of scale in exposure that more aptly fits the proportions of the human soul. I don’t mean soul in the religious sense. I mean soul as the deepest, best part of the human being that recognizes personal talent has its own scale that fits the needs that it is drawn to. It’s a bit more like a balancing act — sharing your gift out of the confidence of its value while trying to convince your ego not to believe that it is more than it is. Perhaps it’s more like “enough is enough." And that's a genuinely good thing.
This is not a blog perhaps because I sense my own soul is a bit shy. It takes a bit of coaxing to come out of hiding. When it does, its voice is visible, robust, courageous and confident. And creating something— a website, an annual report, a logo— is a soul-filled activity. So this space will be dedicated to creative expression… a very dynamic activity to be sure.
Stephen B. Starr, March 22, 2008
