design philosophy inspo: boomer websites
I’ve recently been thinking of really old, selfmade websites I know that are 20+ years old and have been consistently going for that long. For example, the website of a random man just documenting his life and what happened in his city. Images, ratings, recommendations, flea market finds, anything. Tons of links and subpages, pages that are intensely long because of all the content on it. No editorializing, no snappy titles, no need to reinvent oneself and wipe the whole thing every few years. Just an uncut log of life of a person in an area, all the changes.
I like that there seems to be no pressure to keep everything on the site related to the current version or interests of the person, or the urge to shorten everything for an impatient viewer. I think growing up on social media has taught us to keep everything up to date and delete old or outdated things. We also have as little in the navigation as possible to not waste people’s time, or because we think “No one is gonna see all that anyway.”
I’m not really interested in that anymore, though - I also want to add, add, add without feeling the need to prune or update. I did reduce my website to a little amount of pages, and I don’t regret that, because the removed or consolidated ones truly were pages that needed a lot of updating based on their intent and topic. There are a lot of things you can add though that can simply remain up untouched, especially if you approach it from a calendar design perspective.
What I mean is: instead of creating one general picture dump page you add onto until it becomes too long and you wonder what to delete, how to continue, how to archive etc., or one where you only ever post the latest images and delete the rest, you immediately think of it as time-bound and made to last, made to look back on as the photo dump of 2025 (or of you want it more granular, january 2025). Or you tie it to an event instead of dumping it all into one page, being even more distinctive. The photo dump is just an example, it could also be blog posts, week notes, statuses, quotes, blog rolls, new terms you learned, your hobby pages, bookmarks and more. You can even sort it into eras of you, if that’s more your thing.
I think future you is also going to be thankful to you for incrementally saving things and being able to go through years of that page format/content, instead of only ever having the last few months. If the service provider is building things to last and you want to take advantage of that, you also need to start thinking of how you can structure your content to last, how to keep the portions that need updating easy to update while designing everything else with archiving in mind. If you want that, you need to let go of the social media way of the tabula rasa and only ever living in the “now” online.
You don’t have to do that, of course - being fleeting, ephemeral, exclusive and mysterious online has its benefits. But I’m getting more interested in keeping a trail, showing a progress, a life work. This life work doesn’t care about engagement, reader time, bait titles, going viral, or what could be overwhelming to the viewer or too much to even digest. It’s just there, a rabbithole to be explored and not everything has to be discovered immediately. People can take different routes through it, or explore a different section each time they visit if they desire. I don’t need my web presence short like a business card. I’m no longer interested in always compressing who I am into a short form format, an elevator pitch, always encapsulating perfectly who I am in a neat summary and hiding everything that no longer applies. I’m okay with the multiple facets of me being out there and explored.
I think this is also affected by my wish to return to previous internet habits, where you’d jump around the net via hyperlinks and got lost on websites exploring them, instead of the current era of internet, where people hardly ever click links and spend only a minute or so on the linked site. The people who care about views and virality are catering their content to this short stay and even shorter attention span. Their content is like “Wait! I know you want to return to Facebook, but stay just a minute longer for this short article with a clickbait title!”. That’s not the internet I want, so I don’t recreate it.
You don’t have to think of building a legacy as this profitable and useful thing that will impress other people - you can just build something for yourself and maybe a loved one to enjoy looking back on. The thought of having stuck to something for 20+ years is exciting to me.
So I’ll definitely continue to reiterate on my page design to reflect this and let all that influence my website and blog choices.
Reply via email
Published 10 Feb, 2025