entrancesSome believe a website should open straight to its logical menu of options. Perhaps - but I think personal sites are a bit different, and people that visit them expect to see something different, something personal, and not just a menu of options.
These are the entry pages (splash pages) that I have written and used. They're nothing more than an expression of what I was feeling at some moment, typically using a simple hack, sometimes left up for many, many months at a time.
These are all alternative entrances to the site, and thus all* take you back to the same place. The pages have been slightly updated - html validated, tags lowercased - but should look the same as they did originally.
Back in '96, the year I took my first contract with Microsoft, an effort was made to encourage everyone (blue and orange badge's combined) to use the words 'explore', 'explorer', or 'exploring' in anything and everything we did that in any way took on a 'Microsoft look-and-feel' (e.g. an email sent to someone that comes from an @microsoft.com email address qualifies for a Microsoft look and feel. Marketing collateral would obviously qualify, etc...) instead of using 'navigate', 'navigator', or 'navigation'. If you think back to what was taking place during this time frame the reason should be obvious.
While there's no ethical or moral problems with a company suggesting (and they did suggest, not demand) you use words, terms, and phrases that help promote their own products instead of a competitors, I must admit that I found this to be challenging. As was the genius of Netscape, using the term 'Navigator' for their browser ensured that the more common term used to describe the actions suggested by the associated words would in and of themselves be marketing material for their product.
But in what has turned out to be the even greater genius of Microsoft, 'exploring' the web neither attaches nor excludes itself from the concept of static 'structure'. The difference is subtle. So subtle that until you really sit down and think about it you may not even see and/or agree with my point. But even after you put some thought into it, whether you agree or whether you don't is of no great consequence. We're all entitled to view the world the way we choose to view it. But in reading the first paragraph of Tantek's 'entrances' page:
Some believe a website should open straight to its logical menu of options. Perhaps - but I think personal sites are a bit different, and people that visit them expect to see something different, something personal, and not just a menu of options.
has opened my eyes a bit to realize he's exactly right.
Now I'm not suggesting we all get rid of our menus and site navigation (< see) systems. But what I am suggesting is that in a world where instant publishing has become both possible as well as the norm, maybe its time we 'let go and let God' so to speak, building our menus and site navigation systems more around the concept of 'dynamically exploring' instead of 'statically navigating'.
What I like even more about Tantrik's entrances page is that he has built it using both concept's. He first showcase's a list of static 'snapshots' in his personal site's history while extending things by suggesting in no certain terms that the page in and of itself is a dynamic list of static snapshots, an ever evolving and growing way to look at things the way they once were without binding and gagging the site to one way and one way only at looking at his 'world on the web.'
As subtle in difference as the terms may be "exploring the dynamic web one static navigational snapshot at a time" is a phrase that I really like as it allows room for both sides of the collective genius to take their place at the Web's dinner table as we move forward into the ever growing and evolving 'WorldWideWeb', which of course allows for the genius of Tim Berners-Lee to continue in his spot at the tables head.
Mmmm... I wonder what's for dinner tonight? :D