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Tam Lin Pages Mission Statement
(or why boring is good)
First of all, I don't really know what a mission statement is, other than something that companies put in their packet of investor information, new employee orientation, and possibly on a little plaque hidden behind a Ficus benjamina in the front foyer of the corporate office. The ones I've read tended to be fairly boring, along the lines of "We aim to provide the best customer sevice in the industry while mainting high product quality, and to acheive a global marketing position best situated to dominate the ecomonic sectors we service.". I think most companies should be more honest and say "We aim to screw the customer, cut all the corners that won't lead to lawsuits, abuse the employees, and make high enough profit margins to please our stockholders while we ruthlessly engage in hostile takeovers of our competitors so we can squish them like bugs". Since I have no employees, no stock or stockholders, and I generally try to avoid squishing even the insects in my garden, this approach to a mission statement unlikely to be an accurate statement for my website. The only product I have is my web pages, freely available, and I don't take a lot of notice of who the viewers (customers) are unless they leave interesting comments in my guestbook. So instead, this page is here so I can tell you about philosophy behind the design of my web pages.
I've had a website in one form or another since early '96, and have been on the net in general since '92, back when a .sig file for finger viewing was the closest thing I had to a web page. (how many of you know or remember what that was?) During all of that time I've been through many different versions of myself, let alone versions of myself as displayed to the wondering and wandering public. I went through the phase of tell-all, from what book I was reading at the time to my thoughts on current events. I played with frames and javascript and animations.
After the general thrill wore off, I started tightening up my web pages. I removed clutter, made images smaller and faster to load, got rid of frames, chucked out pages with personal info after one too many weirdos wrote to tell me about, well, um, I'm mostly repressed those memories, but they were kinda creepy. I tested my pages to make sure the html was clean if not advanced, and that they loaded quickly. I killed off the animations, the javascript, and said no to pretty much every other bell or whistle that came down the path since then. Most of the toys are mere distractions, a few are actually quite impressive if used correctly (which they rarely are), and only a very few of those actually add anything meaningful to the information on a website. None of them are needed for what I want to do in my webspace anyway.
Some time around '98 I decided to purchase a domain name, and decided that the main content of my web pages was going to be actual content, rather than me blathering about subjects that weren't of interest to anyone who didn't already know me. I'd made a bunch of pages on the topic of Tam Lin, and as far as I know it was the most complete resource on the topic available on the web. It was an obscure topic, but it was mine. I wanted my place on the web to earn any praise or criticism based on its own merits, not on that of the personality or character of the creator. I have somewhat softened on my stance on personality web pages since then, so you will find pictures of my cats again, and a few small pages of commentary from yours truly (but no pictures, never again!). I have made a point of putting these pages in a seperate area though, so as not to distract the folks who came here to learn about Tam Lin instead of me.
Granted, there aren't a lot of people who are interested in Tam Lin, so perhaps this approach doesn't truly have any wider appeal than me talking about my cats or my job, but at least it feels more useful. The website will never make any money, it will never receive a lot of hits, and I suspect most casual websurfers who wander in will wander out again just as quickly. I hope that a few people will find information they wanted to know but couldn't find elsewhere, and that the information will stand on its own. I work on the website in my free time, so change is slow. I try to keep the graphics down so it is accesible to the most people, so there's rarely anything flashy here to make for eye candy. If I could compare my goals for my website to a non-web institution, I'd go for the feel of a comfortable old library. The atmosphere should be relaxing, tasteful, easy accesible, but primary designed to serve the purpose of communicating information. There should be few distractions, and what distractions there are should be off in another area. I don't stamp out the webpages though, or impose fines if you don't come back soon enough.
It IS little geeky to run a website about old folktales, and making a point of making the website dull by the standards of bleeding edge proponents doesn't add much to the charisma, but in the end, this is probably the best thing for the topic. Stories like this should keep the feel of age about them, and for the web, going with techniques of presentation that were available five years ago is positively ancient. It isn't perfect, I'm a poor speller and a worse typist, and many of the pages haven't been properly overhauled in years. I need to work on so many areas that I'd have to seriously neglect other areas of my life to get it all up and running anytime soon (and with so many cats, neglect has serious consequences fairly quickly). Still, I hope that you find the website informative and entertaining, and if the topic is of interest to you, that is isn't as boring as it could be. To those of you who DO find this all pretty boring, well, I'd fire an insult at you, but I'm sure you attention span had no chance of getting to the end of this page anyway.
Enjoy your visit, and I hope you have a good time while you are here.
and while I still have your attention, I'd like to say that my personal mission includes world domination, mandatory spay and neuter of companion animals, and getting rid of all websites with .midi files playing in the background. Thank you.