your guilty pleasure
The current form of my website (not this blog) is probably the most mobile-friendly one I have ever had. You can mostly read and interact, and with a little fiddling or zooming in occasionally, you can make it work. The terminal behind the laptop is okay-ish on mobile. Some more hidden pages are definitely for desktop, but it used to be worse.
My website, generally, is a little test on how far you are willing to engage to get to know me. Just landing on it, you won't necessarily figure out to click the laptop. From there, you get some words suggested to enter, but it's on you to write the correct thing. How many are you willing to enter? And will you guess the others that aren't suggested? Will you truly guess, or even look into the code?
I could present it all on a blank white screen, immediately visible, not behind little tests and words and hidden secrets. But that's not really what I am about; I like to see who puts in the effort, I like to ward off weirdos, and I like the game, and I like design. I like when people send me emails mentioning things they only know because they dug through it all. It will of course reject and turn away a portion of people, and I am okay with that. We both know this isn't really disappointing or depriving anyone of a valuable resource. In real life, I am not letting just anyone enter my house as well; and having access to someone, or specific information, is a privilege in basically anyone's life, not just mine.
And the point of all this writing is: I have always gotten many, many compliments on my websites, no matter which design iteration or what content. The top sites on website hosters such as Nekoweb or Neocities are very beautiful, inspiring, creative works of art that are mostly not mobile-friendly. They get linked everywhere, sent to each other via email and DM. They're on people's favorite website lists and button pages, even the ones who make big blog or forum posts about how the webmasters of inaccessible websites are smug assholes. That makes me giggle. Are we your guilty pleasure? Despite the ideological difference, you cannot deny its beauty, and that in itself is kind of beautiful.
There was this one website I really enjoyed. The design was really unique and I had seen no one else do something like that. Browsing it was really fun, there were lots of things and secrets to discover. But then, they decided to forego it all to rework it with a mobile-first design approach, and it all vanished1. The color scheme stayed, but it got turned into the bland looking, seen 3000 times three-column corporate looking layout that rearranges itself so perfectly on mobile via flexbox and all that. It looked so ... clean. It's like they washed off all the character, everything that tied the design back to them. The self expression was reduced to a minimum. For what? So some invisible strangers on mobile aren't mad at them? The same tends to happen when people do keep their nice designs on desktop, but make some new one for mobile. Totally toned down, changed, like half of it missing. Some things just don't translate well to mobile, and that's fine.
I fully acknowledge that mobile is the only way a significant part of the world accesses the web, especially poor people. But that's not the only connotation I have, in fact it's not even the main connotation to mobile that I have. When I think of mobile, I think of slop, marketing, clickbait thumbnails, likes and followers, ads, endless shopping, corporate algorithms, doomscrolling. I think of us all trying to shrink ourselves into the social media sites' profile template. I think of the bullshit the smartphone companies all tried to pull, used to pull, are still pulling. Preinstalled apps, locked down devices, walled gardens, customization to a bare minimum, proprietary repairs; brand is more important. It feels like anything larger than a tablet or phone, I can make mine and bend and break, upgrade and redo as I see fit, but not these capitalism rectangles. Their whole form factor, to me, reeks of attention exploitation to make someone more money2. So the idea of perfectly shrinking my online presence to that is icky. Text-based stuff like this blog, sure, but that's more the platform I'm on than me. But not intentionally more than that, not at the cost of what I want to build, how I want to present myself.
I understand when, to some others, it feels great to do that. Like reclaiming this rectangle into something non-corporate and creative. I appreciate that, but it's not for me. I don't feel empowered by setting up camp trying to reclaim something that I feel is fundamentally designed to not be in line with my values. My web presence doesn't have to be an ad for the small web for some smartphone kid to find and suddenly decide to ditch the rest. Making websites from scratch that isn't Squarespace or Carrd is almost inherently non-accessible based on all the guides and learning involved plus the setup; I have also tried coding on the smartphone and sometimes still do3, but it's horrible, and I've known some Nekoweb people who had to do the same for a while and it mega sucked for them. You're going to need access to something else.
Recently, I played a game, and one text in it caught my eye and is more or less one of the reasons why I decided to write about it. This of course needs nuance; as you likely know, I am chronically ill and my illnesses are disabling, so you should be able to infer what side I am usually on when it comes to accessibility. But in art and personal websites... I am flexible.
Screenshots of the game Arctic Eggs.
Published 22 Dec, 2024
There is one other person I know this applies to, but their new redesign slapped so hard it was actually as amazing as the old website and so well executed, so if you're reading this, no this is not about you and I still admire your design skills on that!! Yours is actually an extremely rare example of a mobile website that's still fun, unique, and fitting to you <3↩
I don't really want to repeat all the good that the internet and smartphones have done to the world because there are countless other posts on my blog where I discuss that; just trust that I am aware of it.↩
Whenever you come here and the 'a' in the title isn't blinking, that's when I sit on my sofa on my phone and just tried to edit one little thing and ruined it all.↩