Assignment 6: Planting Your Garden

For one week, you learned how to build a website. In the next two days, you decide what your website is for.

These two days have no code in them (phew). You look at what you know, you look at how other people build their personal websites, and then you write a plan that you can continue for many months. A plan that is too large is the usual reason that a personal website stops after three weeks, so keep your plan small.

Schedule

Day 7 (today). In the class, you make a list of your subjects and you examine the websites of other people. After the class, you select your sections and you write a manifesto.

Day 8 (tomorrow). In the morning, you read the purpose statements of the other students and you discuss them. Then you draw a site map and you write an update plan for each section. This work has a professional name, information architecture, and tomorrow we learn the full process. The design work starts on Friday.

Day 7, in class

Task 1: Make a list of what you know

You know more subjects than you think, but the subjects are in your memory and not in one place. In this task you move them onto a wall, where you can see all of them together and find the connections between them.

Write one item on each sticky note. Use paper notes or an online board such as FigJam. These groups are a start, but you can make your own groups if they are better for you:

Things that you have learnt and did not expect to get good at
Tools and methods that other people possibly do not know
Procedures that you found by trial and error
Opinions that few other people agree with
Projects that you do now, also very small projects
Collections that you make, also collections that are only in your mind

When all the notes are on the wall, arrange them. Put related notes near each other, and draw a line between two notes that connect in some way. The notes at the center of the wall usually show your main subjects. Some notes stay alone, but they can still be of interest to you, so do not remove them.

Task 2: Read about personal websites, then examine some

Other people made these decisions before you, and many of them wrote about the decisions. Read a minimum of one of these essays:

Then look at a minimum of five personal websites. You can start at these locations:

Robin Sloan’s notes
Maggie Appleton’s website
Tom MacWright’s blog
Winnie Lim’s journal
Neocities and webrings
Your mood board from Day 1. Look at those websites again, because you know more now than you did on Day 1.
Marginalia Search, which is useful to find small blogs about your own subjects
More small-web and indieweb search engines and lists: Kagi Small Web and its source list of feeds, searchmysite.net, the IndieWeb webring and IndieWeb.org’s sites list, and ooh.directory (blogs organized by subject)

Then select one website that you like and examine it carefully. Write notes (I don’t want vibes and short notes here, explain! expound! elucidate!) on it, and answer these questions in your notes:

What does this person assume you already know?
Where is the newest thing on the site? How did you find it?
Where is the oldest thing? Did the author keep it, change it, or hide it? If nothing on the site has a date, that is also an answer.
What is the smallest thing the author published? How long would it take you to make one of those?
Which navigation choice would no template make?
Where do you hear the author’s voice most clearly?
What would break if this site had to live on Instagram?
Steal one idea.

Task 3: Look at your sticky notes again

Read your notes about the website that you examined. Then look at your wall of sticky notes again, because the notes usually look different after you see the work of a different person. Answer these questions:

Which groups of notes can become a section of your website?
Where does the idea that you took from a different website fit?
What type of website do these groups make together?

Day 7, after the class

The 15-minute test

Most personal websites stop because each new item is too much work. Do this test on each possible section before you select it. Ask: “Can I add one new item to this section in 15 minutes, on a usual day, when I am tired?”

If the answer is no, the item is a project and not a section, so do not select it. Projects are of course permitted on the website, but they are not the parts that keep the website in use.

Write

Select a minimum of three sections for your website.
Write a manifesto of 200 to 300 words about the place that holds those sections. Most manifestos fail in the same way. They are true for every website and every person, because they contain opinions about the internet and no objects from your own life. The six rules below make that type of text impossible, so follow all of them.

Your manifesto must contain:

Three things that will exist on the website, with their exact names. “A list of every bus that I take in this city” is a name. “A blog” is not a name.
One reader, with a name. Write for one person that you know. Do not write for “people” or for “anyone who visits”.
One refusal. Tell the reader what is never on this website, and who can leave now.
One number. How frequently you add something, and on which day.
One thing that you do not put on Instagram or LinkedIn. Tell the reader why it is safe on your own website.

Do not use these words today: algorithm, authentic, corporate, creative journey, digital garden, explore, in today’s world, journey, passion, showcase, space to express myself, unfiltered, and vibe. You heard most of them in the class this morning. Use your own words for the same ideas.

The form is yours. A manifesto can be a list of rules, a letter to one person, or a description of an object. It does not have to be three paragraphs of prose.

If you cannot start, complete some of these sentences and then remove the parts that you do not want:

This is a place for ____.
It is not a ____.
If you came here for ____, you can leave now.
The oldest thing here will be ____.
I add to it when ____.
Nothing here is ____.
You can tell that it is mine because ____.
Elsewhere I pretend that ____. Here I do not.

There are example manifestos at https://yesterweb.org/#appendix-i. Read them for ideas, but do not copy them, because the tone must be your own.

Day 8, in class

Read the manifestos of everyone else, and discuss how each person selected a different tone for the same task.
Draw a site map on paper. Use your groups of sticky notes as the sections, and show how a visitor moves through the website.
Put your site map on the wall and show it to the class.
Choose your navigation labels and walk one user flow for the reader that your manifesto names.
Write an update plan for each of your sections. There are instructions below.

The update plan

Different types of content become old at different speeds. A list of the books that you read is correct on the day that you write it, but a page about the tools that you use is not correct after some months. If you know the speed for each section, you know how much work the website is in one year.

Write two or three sentences for each section. Answer these questions:

How quickly does the content in this section become old or incorrect? Give a time, for example one week, six months, or never.
How frequently will you add a new item to this section?
What do you do with the old content? Select one of these three actions: you keep it and you show the date, you change it, or you remove it.

Deliverables

Put these items in your dev notes:

Item	When
A photograph of your wall of sticky notes	Day 7 dev note
Your notes about the one website that you examined	Day 7 dev note
Your three sections. Write one sentence for each section about the 15-minute test.	Day 7 dev note
Your manifesto of 200 to 300 words	Day 7 dev note
A photograph of your site map on paper	Day 8 dev note
An update plan for each section, of two or three sentences	Day 8 dev note