About the site, but longer.

Why a website?

To put it simply: I wanted a place to archive my art and my OCs.

Before this site was made, a lot of stuff I've created are lost to time and my deleted social media accounts. I used to move between different platforms a lot, before eventually realizing I'm not a big fan of maintaining a presence in social medias. One day, I stumbled upon Neocities and lurked there for a while, and the idea of creating my own website eventually got me on a chokehold, possessed me to bring together a page, and bam. I think I started off using sadgrl's layout builder, then I found a tutorial for 11ty to help create Neocities page, then the rest is history.

Honestly, with a basic grasp on HTML and CSS (and a courage + resources to deal with JS, should you want to deal with fancier features), you're off to a decent start in creating your own website.

Plus, I have a lot of things to share with the world, whether it's my artworks, or my characters, or my stories. But without a stable place to keep and cherish them, they can be easily lost to time. I guess you can say this desire to archive things walk hand-in-hand with my creative output. Now that I have my own website, I basically have full control over what gets archived without too many limits, how to organize them, how to customize the overall look—and I've grown to fall in love with it.

A desire to archive

I have a strong feeling about this aspect when it comes to this website...

The ability to treat this website as my personal metaphoric garden where I can add, remove, adjust, or just move things around to my own whims has been precious to me. If there are any troubles, I can just wrestle with my code editor or my computer files, rather than having to navigate around the technical limits imposed by other sites (e.g. image limits, page limits, word limits, inability to bulk edit/delete stuff, inability to arrange things the way I want, and so on). Now that I have more control over the technical stuff, I might as well make this website a great, grand sanctuary for my creations.

I can get pretty fickle when it comes to posting things anywhere outside of this website, and I keep forgetting things... If I don't archive my creation anywhere, there's a good chance I can forget about its existence within a few days. (And it gets much worse when you have an expansive OC universe but you don't really have a place to put all that down somewhere.) So having a consistent place to archive my stuff has been doing wonders in reminding that I really exist on this earth. Plus, I get to have control over this archive called bntarwarn.com too, so more power to me.

And lastly, it's a much different experience than posting your artworks on social medias or doing it for an audience. I personally find updating my own artworks on my site to be a much more liberating than posting them on social media. Something something not having the expectations to maintain an image/perform in front of others. I can just fuck around and do my own thing in my little corner, where people can choose to look at whatever I've been up to. Publishing things for an audience isn't something I'm really into (but it would be neat if people vibe with what I've been up to), so this website serves as an archive for myself first and foremost.

Assorted Thoughts

• Is creating my own personal website a replacement for social medias? No, not really. They're two separate things scratching two different itches for me. However, it's nice to have a space for personal self-expression and having it be my personal website instead of socmeds. My personal feelings towards social medias are much less intense than my desire to express myself, so this page would have more of "creating a website is fucking awesome!!!" energy to it.
• 11ty really helps me out a lot in bringing my art archive to life, even if I don't fully grasp how to draw out its full potential at the time of creating this post. (Or if you're not really 11ty person, you can look into other static site builders, PHP, or any other tools to help you bring your own website to life!)