Home pages don't (In My Humble Opinion) need to have a purpose, they're permitted to just hang around and say 'This Person Exists!'. However, it seems to me that those with somewhat of a purpose tend to be more interesting and easier to read.
So here are some of the purposes of my pages:
- To tell the world a bit about me, and hopefully in the process educate people about what it's like to have and to live with a bunch of disabilities and chronic illnesses (don't get scared, that's the only really serious purpose :)).
- To show, by example, that huge flashy graphics are not necessary for a good page. Things which flash, or take hours to download, do not make a good page in 99% of cases - usually they just make the reader annoyed. This overlaps with the point that graphics can be small in size and still look good. Small Is Beautiful too!
- Similarly, to show that pages can be set up to be totally accessible to anybody no matter what their hardware, software, line speed, or disability, and they can always be accessible and still look nice to a "regular" user.
- To show that a page can look interesting and not be dependent on the browser used. Seeing "You Must Have Netscrape/Internut Exploder to view this page" drives me nuts. HTML was designed so that it didn't matter what software you used, you could still view a page. Mostly I view web pages with Lynx or a Gnome-based Mozilla-based browser called Galeon! I've taken care that Lynx will work too, so you'll get almost as much out of this page with a text-based browser or a screen-reader or braille display as you will with a standard fully graphical browser. Since I've got several friends who are blind, and a lot more whose main or only web access is via text-based browsers, this is important to me.
- And lastly but not leastly, to show that girls can write great HTML and CGI too! I taught myself HTML markup in a few days of web reading. I taught myself/learned Perl over about 6 months, although I'm still learning the intricacies of course - Perl is one of those things you can go on learning just about forever. And, of course, all the CGI scripts and HTML markup on this site I've done myself.
Now, about all the constant changes you'll see happening here ... these pages are not 'under construction', they are living breathing documents that changes as often as I come up with something new to do with it, which varies between multiple times every day and less than once a year depending on my mood, and what real life is doing. They are finished at almost every step along the way, just a more or little less finished! I tend to find an arrangement I like, incrementally change it for a while, and then pull the whole structure down and start again when I get sick of it :), just my particular brand of insanity.
You won't find a 'Guest Book' here because I prefer my comments pages! That way I knew which section or page you're reading when you thought of it, and you don't have to fumble around searching for the guest-book page if you think of something. You won't find a 'Hit Counter' prominently displayed because I really don't see the point. It's here, because I like to track which pages are the most popular so I can develop those areas of the site that get read most, but it's not so people can play dick-size wars with me. Do you honestly think people are really more likely to read a page because there's a big number at the top? I don't put this page up because x number of people view it every day, I put it up because I want to. There is a hit counter here, but if you spot it without actually searching for it I'd be mildly surprised.
Hit counters are notoriously inaccurate measures of the number of people who visit anyway, see Doug Ingram's coherent rant on the topic for a complete explanation. My hit counter only counts hits from outside of my own domain, so all the times that I look at these pages to check that things are working don't get counted. If I'm going to do something, I might as well do it properly.
Oh, and if you're trying to learn HTML, ask me for some sample pages. Just selecting "view source", or saving the pages to your hard drive, will give you slightly to very different view (depending on the page) of what the code looks like. Why? Because I freely use server-side includes and .cgi scripts that are all melded out and added to the page before you see it. You don't think I'd add that footer by hand to every single page and change every single page just to tweak the footer did you? But I'll freely explain how and what I've done to you, if you honestly want to know.
Each one teach one.
That's all. Now, I don't say that I think everybody should write pages like I do, there's a couple of people whose graphic-rich pages I absolutely adore. But I also know many pages where graphics are used un-necessarily and to little effect and it just drives me mad.
