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What Is Up With Personal Sites?!.

This is just something I noticed not long ago that I just HAD to comment on. A good majority of sites in webrings, fanlistings, cliques and listings are personal sites, be they hosted, on free servers or on their own domains. Now this isn't necesarily a bad thing mind you, after all this is a personal site as well, but there is one glaring flaw that I keep finding in all these 'personal' sites that is really beginning to tick me off.

What the hell is so friggin personal about quizes, polls, and games?! *eye twitches* someone please explain this to me because I am seriously not understanding this at all!

A personal site is suposed to be about the creator, it is suposed to tell you about them and give you insight to the person behind the website. Now I can understand wanting to create some visitor content so that visitors have something to do and arn't completely bored out of their minds, because lets face it who wants to go to a site and just read long lists of plain boring text about someone they've never met? No one. Now I'm as much of a fan of quizes as the next person, but I'm sorry, when you have like ten quizes, a bunch of adoptions, wall papers, icons and one biography page about your self that is NOT a personal site. Thats a 'Jane Doe's Fun Site!' with a little 'about the author' page thrown in for curiosity's sake.

I know your laughing at me or thinking something along the lines of 'pot calling the kettle black'. Well let me point something out. If you look at the navigation it is divided into seven major sections, and of those sections only one is exclusively for the visitor only.

'Lady Dragon' is a section that consists of solely of information pertaining to me the webmistress. That section consists of sixteen different sub divisions that are all once again, about me. There is not just your a typical bio, blog, faves, friends pages that can be found at most sites.

Now the 'Dragon's Works' and 'Fanatical' sections also pertain to me. Dragon's Works is made up of my original creations; poetry, short stories, novellas, art - its all there. Simply put, its a section that displays my creative side. Fanatical is where my fan-made creations are located such as my fan art and fanfiction. It also show cases MY favorite characters that I wish I had the time/patience/space to make shrines for.

One might say the 'Playpen' could be considered, in an odd sort of way, as a section for the guest. However its not, really it isn't. This section is more of a place to store the net-things I've collected and amassed over the years. After all are your knickknacks, bottlecap collections, comics, baseball cards, and various other items that you have collected over the years and displayed in your room meant to be there to entertain your visitors? I think not. You collected them because they meant something to you, amused your, reminded you of something or just plain screamed "keep me!". And if you have a collection of something be it anime, DVDs, stamps, bottlecaps or whatever, you always have a place to display it right? I mean I havn't met anyone who collects stuff and then just throws it on the floor. Everyone has some sort of display case, shelf, box, or book that holds their treasures; and tat my friend is what the playpen is.

'Exits' and 'Site Stuff' are your rudamentry sections that one pretty much needs, and so we'll not even get into that. But last we come to the 'For You' section it contains: free graphics, downloadable sound clips, doujinshis to view and read, an interactive 'guess the lyrics' and 'guess the anime and character', and a list of interantil cusswords. The section is small, yes, but then again this is a personal site ment to amuse me and inform you about me, not a "--^{@LaDy RoSe's FuN fUn FuN SaHtE@}^-- =^_^=". Now I'm not saying my site is perfect, no one's is, but it is certainly without a doubt a personal site about me, which is exactly what it is.

In short, I'd like to see more personal sites that are actually about the AUTHOR/CREATOR/WEBMASTER/WEBMISTRESS or whatever it is that you wish to call yourself. If I wanted to go to a site to just play games, take quizes, and read jokes I would go to a site that had that stuff and featured those aspects rahter than going to a personal site.

One more thing! If some people actually put the effort into making real personal sites that they do into making elaborate layouts and 'fun visitor content' then there would be some really awesome and creative sites out there. Are people such sheep that if they get bad comments on their sites they think they must add what everyone else has in way of 'fun stuff', hoping that it will add 'content' to their site and thus, make it worth visiting?

Now dont get me wrong, I'm not against people putting quizes on their sites, or fun little 'guess whos' either. What I'm against are sites where the 'things to do' or 'for you' sections are bigger than the 'about me' sections! That is NOT a personal site. Please just either take some stuff down or take your site out of the personals section and put it where it belongs.

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