How Ely goes about making its websites, and what's changed in the last 3 years

2024 11 11

We've been thinking about our relationship to web design, and our own websites, a lot lately. This website, in particular, is something we are very proud of, and very thankful for. In some ways, it is hard to believe it has almost been three years since we put it online, and in other ways, it is surprising it has only been three years, because of how foundational the website feels to us.

We started our website as a sort of coping mechanism and as a way to express ourselves. It was directly inspired by Cadence's website, and we got a lot of help from her while making ours. We had technically learned how to do webdev in school, but those skills were completely unpractised, and somewhat surface level. The help made it a lot easier! And it was a very fun learning experience, if not occasionally overwhelming.

The reason we chose to use a website for artistic expression was because it felt like it had continuity to it, in a way most art things do not. We could update it with new information over time, and change existing information as well. Websites can be repeatedly iterated upon, endlessly. It was also very accessible, relatively, and helped us store our thoughts somewhere concrete and long term, which is particularly important to us, since we are extremely Autistic, and because we have partial amnesia.

And, truth be told, I still think these are the main reasons why we use and maintain this site. It's become a part of us, changing and growing as we do, documenting our lives, etcetera. And the ideas of continuity and documentation still guide how we go about web design to this day, and I'd like to share what I mean.

There are a few different key elements to web design, at least in our mind.

1. Overall theme (and inspiration therein)
2. Style and how information is presented
3. Body (text, main content, etc)
4. Asset design
5. Navigation structure
6. Polishing

Each of these elements take a lot of energy to work on and make right, and very rarely do I have the energy for more than one or two in a given day. This has historically been a big barrier to making web stuff, since we had the feeling it needed to be just right when we published it.

Since, though, we've moved to embrace the messy chaos of iterative design. This is to say, we only focus on the particular element that interests us most at that time, and add supporting elements later.

The current webblog theme and style we're using was designed for a specific (unpublished) webblog. But it wasn't designed in parallel with that blog post, and instead we wrote the text and made the style independent of each other. Therefore, I could publish the webblog when I was ready, without waiting until it looked just how I wanted, and then work on the style asynchronously when i had the energy. or vice versa.

Sometimes a girl just wants to infodump. Sometimes she just wants to decorate webpages!

Taking advantage of the iterative nature of personal web design has signficantly reduced the perceived barrier to entry, for us. It also has gotten ourselves comfortable with redesigning and touching up pages whenever I feel like. It also helps give us smaller hobbies to do in our free time, where we can make new drawings for icons or do small copyedits make small additions.

In a broader sense, though, we design this website not to be presentable, but to make us feel good. It's a very personal thing.

If you haven't explored our website very much recently, then you may not have noticed that the styling seen on our general photography page, our favourite photos page, and our dress up page have all been changed pretty dramatically since we originally uploaded them. I suppose the blog is also like this! I think it's cool that you can kinda play detective when looking at the different styling decisions across our website, and try and reverse engineer how we were thinking and why we changed things over time. Currently, I'm really interested in animations, and am moving in a direction of "controlled maximalism", and you can see both of those in all three of those pages. We've also started to put an ever increasing importance on polishing and organisation, which has become way more important now that I am putting a lot more things onto our pages. A big part of why the old pages have so little flourishes is just because I didn't wanna put in the time to clean things up to look good.

To some extent, you can also gauge how my comfort level with styling and theming has evolved over time. We've always had a very vivid imagination, with very strong ideas what I want things to look like, but we didn't have the skills or motiviation to express those ideas when we orginally published our site. The oppurtintiy for us to work iteratively has given us the ability to slowly ease ourselves into learning how to go about expressing them, in a way that has made it very accessible. Adding bits and bobs on to try and fine tune it, learning how each works as we go. This doesn't show up that much on this site in particular, though, because it is still quite difficult and exhausting working on a website, especially when I know I'm not being payed for it.

Moving forward, we'd like to become more comfortable with simply making themed pages that don't have any correlation to the rest of the website's structure. Just about things I liked, maybe a photo gallery from a particular day or a particular mood. Just one off isolated art projects. It's kinda funny how we've come full circle, and now want to create webpages that are complete pieces of art, and aren't meant as living documents that get updated over time.

Now that it's becoming winter where we live, we've been getting a particular drive to work on our "vreaky" photo gallery, which is a series of liminal feeling images that tell stories of nostalgia. Part of why we want to do this is simply because that is what much of our photography used to be in the past, and we've been reminiscing over our history. here's some of what we've got

beyond that, though, we've had a much greater drive for artistic photography that combined memory keeping. I really appreciate that we left ourselves photos like that to look at today, and so we'd like to make more photos that tell our emotions and thoughts for future ely.

In general, we've changed quite a bit, and very little, since our first webblog. Our capacity for self care has remained exactly level. we would still tell you

we used to play video games very very little. fighting game tournaments used to be where we played games the most, which we went attended to spend time with our friends.

this is something we'd still write today; we still wanan play video games more than we do.

on the other hand, our lives, at least materially, have dramatically changed. We eat signficantly better, and have a much more complex and diverse social life. We feel signficantly more complete than we did then, and we've learned enormous amounts about ourselves sexually. for example, we are now confidently Lesbian, but only really for a tiny fraction of women we meet, and we understand how being demisexual actually affects us in a practical way. Kinks are really important to us, as are extreme intimacy.

I still largely experience the same mental illnesses in the same way. It definitely feels different, but in what way I'm not sure. We disassociate a LOT less now, though, because of how much more social and complete our lives have become. We also have signficantly less energy, both mentally and physically, and I imagine that is also a result of doing signficantly more things than we used to. In a way we kind of missed how special every little thing felt in the past, and wish we could bring it back, but we know that everything felt so special because we were so depraved of resources, especially materially.

At the same time though, we kinda feel like it continues to live on, just in a different form. Now chores take all of my mental capacity even if they're incredibly minor, and it sucks. Hyperaware of every aspect about them, overwhelming myself over nothing.

We can say pretty confidently though that we are less in touch with ourselves from 3 years ago. Of course, if you exclude the disassociation. And this has caused us a lot of stress recently, as we feel like we aren't who we want to be anymore. I imagine a lot of things are positive changes that just feel scary in the moment, but are a part of it truly is just... we've let parts of ourselves go that we miss, like being a doll and having pizza parties with our plushies, and being fluffy and cuddly with our friends. we miss feeling like our living space represents us. now it just feels utilitarian. i want to remember how to let myself have break time, and let myself be me, without fear. i want to feel like my room is a safe place again, and i want to feel alive and like who I am has greater importance over what I do.

it's not necessarily that we've been too busy to care about ourselves. well, this is true occasionally. but its more a factor that, we don't know how to love ourselves and care for ourselves anymore. at least not when we're forced to by others. we never let ourselves have break time, and we don't know how to use free time anymore. there are lots of things we want to do in our free time, but we... Can't. We just physically cannot let ourselves for some reason.

Within the last one or two months, we have started trying to work on rebuilding ourselves and who we are. There was something extremely traumatic and destabilising that happened that made self actualisation impossible about halfway through, but within the last couple weeks we managed to overcome it. we've begun to give ourselves hobbies and play time and have been trying to let ourselves do self care time, and to relearn how to heal things like BPD meltdowns and emotional messyness. trying to remember who we want to be.

which, is elysia. we wanna be elysia. and truth is, we have been elysia this entire time. but we've not been fair to ourselves.

our life is generally trending in a positive direction, with exciting new goals and objectives that bring their own challenges on the way. up until last two months we hadn't had a single long term goal to work towards, and its dramatically shifted our thinking style. arguably its made us a lot more strressed and put a lot of pressure on my existing problems of only ever doing productive things.

webdev has become something we feel able to do outside of a hobby! we've learned strategies for organising our writing in a way that makes it a lot easier to read and a lot more fun to write! we've been learning a new language! and, we've been in and out friends, uh. but meeting new people isn't really that hard anymore! even if finding meaningful relationships has been hard.

i dont really know how we feel about our relationships, currently. It feels like a lot of our most important relationships have withered, recently. This is part of why we've become so driven to take better care of ourselves, and also why reflecting on the past is starting to become melancholic. but its also caused us a great deal of distress and confusion, because we're hypersocial. i think we're probably in a good spot, especially going forward, but... it is hard not to feel like a part of us has been lost in those past relationships. and that... hurts. there's a comfort and stability that comes from continuity, knowing that you're always the same person just moving along. but that idea has been broken in us for a couple months now. and it's hard. very hard. we've needed to find new ways of handling things, new resources, new supports.

there's a very real chance we come out of this confusion with a much better understanding of self. giving ourselves the self care and time we deserve, caring for ourselves, protecting ourselves, exploring who we are. and, in our eyes, i feel like that is the only way we'll get out of this. by loving ourselves. ends a cycle.

it's just, will i feel safe being myself around others, or feel forced to hide it.