Old Homepage Ways

In which idiom should a homepage be conducted? I've been maintaining a homepage since 2000 or so, half a dozen years now, and in that time it's undergone a considerable mutation as I've thought about how to approach it. It's a pretty important thing for me as many people have referred to my homepage and got good information from it: I've had people invite me to write books from my homepage, people who have read my homepage and cast more accurate lights on things that I have written, and so on.

I look at how other people do their homepages and find that generally they just put up lists of links. There isn't much in the way of conversation going on, except in rare cases. Nick Kew, for example, has a homepage that I've always admired for its tremendous verbosity. I've normally tried to emulate both of these aspects by weaving a tonne of links into a narrative. Unfortunately I always get snagged on the problem of which writing style to use, and I usually end up lapsing into the highly formal, to the extent that people have even commented on it for the current version of my homepage.

I mainly write formally because often the people going to my homepage will be trying to get a formal technical impression of me. Most of the links to it are from the projects that I've worked on. But that's kinda sad since it implies that I should have more than one homepage, for different aspects of what I do. In fact, that is the approach that I took for a long time, having a homepage on each of my sites, and in deference to that I still title my homepage "An Homepage of Sean B. Palmer", indefinite rather than definite article, but it's no longer really true.

I tend to go through a major design iteration of my homepage roughly every six months, and I've decided to do another one now. At first I tried to just pare it down, refining the current version and making it more communicative, but I ended up getting formal again, so I've decided to just can that approach and go with the more traditional list o' links for a while. And, oddly enough, I rather like the new approach. You'd think it would give less information about the sort of communicative style that I have, but as usual less is more: by stripping away all the text, I'm able to, for example, link to my weblogs very prominently and clearly, which gives people a better opportunity to look at some writings of mine conducted in a slightly more normal mode.

Also the styling of the page comes through a bit more subtly when some of the information is gone leaving just the essentials. It's a bit like the zen garden way of homepage design. I'm not sure if I'll continue in this particular idiom come the next design iteration, but I think that for now it's quite a welcome change from my current design, even though the actual styling of it CSSwise is very nice indeed and took quite a bit of work. I should probably archive the design, lipsummed, elsewhere before putting the new design up, if I decide to go with the new spartan design.