Shannon Kay

Why make a classic homepage?

• Own your web presence.
• Recapture the joy of the internet.
• Be creative
• Content that does not have to be an update. (But you can still have updates)
• Just making web pages about things that you like.
• A small batch website

My Website Story

I'm an "early Millennial". My first websites were homepages with rainbow dividers. In 1995, when I was 12, my dad bought me a book called Internet and World Wide Web, Simplified. That's how I learned how the internet worked, and that I should pronounce GIF "like the peanut butter".

My first websites were free homepages. The first was on a website called tool-box which didn't last long and I've never heard anyone else mention. I think it only existed in 1996/97. I moved on to other free hosts like Angelfire, and moved from using the basic form page editors to learning basic html. But the real magic happened after I saw the movie Titanic in January of 1998. I loved it so much, I made a Titanic website called Titanic Crazy. My first fansite!

Working on my Titanic website is what really led to my learning more about making websites and how the internet worked. Soon I was making websites for all of my friends. I even got to redesign the website for my high school theatre department.

For my sixteenth birthday, I asked for a domain name. I got my first domain name, shannonkay.com, in 1999 as a present for my 16th birthday.

Links

• Let's Bring Fansites and Webrings Back
• The Year of the Personal Website
• Building a website like it's 1999... in 2022
• Exploring the Personal Web
• The Whimsical Web - Websites that spark joy.
• How the Blog Broke the Web
• My blog is a digital garden, not a blog