Page envy

What I really want to do with the internet is....perhaps a more legitimate version of what I already do with the internet, i.e. blither on it. But blither in a more structured and organized fashion about specific topics, with really nice graphics and simple navigation.

Over the past eight years or so I've been messing about with LiveJournal layouts. These days with the Russians in charge I use LJ less and less, but I still have a number of friends on there and check it fairly regularly. I've done some of what I consider to be my best design work for LJ backgrounds for the various journals and communities I've created over the years. What I've been working toward is basically a splash page effect, with a background image that doesn't scroll, over which text is laid with limited outlines. The idea is of words that have some connection with the image over which they float, words hanging in a void that allows them to be read but also allows them to be seen through to what lies behind them.

Almost all of my designs have interlaced text and image. I'm a fan of text that doesn't necessarily need to be read so much as observed, letters and words as visual objects rather than as encoders of specific meaning. The background of this blog includes: the ruined Union Carbide plant at Bhopal, laboratory glassware, and several of the user icons I've made over the years for my accounts at LJ.

Since I don't know anything about web design other than really really basic HTML tags (and now a couple of CSS shortcuts) I am forced to rely on a site like Blogger or Wordpress to do the hard work of constructing the actual website for me, while having to manipulate preexisting settings to get the effects I wanted in the first place. It would be nice if I could build my own site from the ground up, on my own domain--and have the convenience of plugging into Blogger's extant network of sites and people to draw traffic to my page.

An example of the kind of site I'd like to be able to create is James Lileks' lileks.com. This is the home of the original Gallery of Regrettable Food, Interior Desecrators, and Mommy Knows Worst, now all available in book form (subtext: I WANT A BOOK DEAL, INTERNET, PLEASE CAN I HAVE A BOOK DEAL), as well as the Institute of Official Cheer. What Lileks does is dig up interesting, amusing, horrific, and remarkable bits of popular culture in recent history--and present them to the modern eye with amused and gentle satire. He's the man behind the trend of Horrible Retro Food Blogging, which I've jumped on myself with the Non-Euclidean Food entries over at What Went Wrong.

His site is always changing its graphics, but its design is consistent: news and navigation on the front page and sub-navigation through links at the bottom of the individual series (back, home, forward).

What I really want, I suppose, is to make a site so fascinating with content so addictive that people will be willing to buy a book version of it.