This website is nearing completion now. The last major part to be
finished should be loaded this week, and that is the Groups section. After that
it will be tidying up any parts of the site that need sorting.
When I look at the site I ask myself how it can have taken so
long to get it all done and finished. It was actually designed and uploaded in
2006 but left alone and not advertised or upgraded until this year. The problem
is, of course, money. It takes quite a lot of cash to design and put together a
website like this. Plus we have another, much larger site that has also been redesigned
twice in that period and keeps us active.
It’s when you offer options that things can go wrong and have to
be thought through very clearly. Even then, sometimes it’s only when users have
been working the site for some time that something quite obvious comes up and I
have to wonder how I could have missed it in the first place! That’s why
feedback is so important.
If I were much younger I would have learned how to program and
that would have made it much easier. In the 90s when the web first came into
being I used to design and write everything in html, it was easy then, but now
web design and programming has become complex and require a lot of skill and a
constant updating of those skills, as well as learning new ones that keep
appearing.
MyBestFive is unlike most social media sites, as it does not
concentrate on the immediacy of a site like facebook, or twitter. It is meant
to have a more leisurely, long-time appeal, where you can read and re-read
articles you have written; look through your photo albums over a long period of
time and chart a course of your life over a period of years.
That sounds like a lofty ambition but it’s designed for an older
audience, certainly it’s unlikely to have much appeal for teenagers. The truth
is though; you never know who is likely to want to write about their life.
I was speaking quite casually to a chap a couple of weeks ago and
he mentioned that his Dad was writing, in longhand, about his experiences with
long expeditions in the arctic, for TV documentaries. He hopes to get it published
but that may not be possible; it would be possible to write extracts on this
site and publish it as an eBook. In his case it’s not about making money but he
wants to get his story out there while he can.
Books very often don’t tell the whole story because they get
edited by publishers and a great deal of material can be taken out of a
manuscript as it’s not interesting, a publisher might say. Or it's too controversial.
A lot of our servicemen and women have spent time in Iraq and
Afghanistan, fighting and doing other things in dangerous conditions; it would
be great to get them to write their stories and for us to read about life in
those conditions. Doctors, nurses and fire fighters will all have exciting
stories to tell but let’s not get the idea that everything has to be exciting.
Everyday life is full of the unexpected and no story is so bland that it
doesn’t resonate with someone, somewhere.
Bringing up children, being unemployed; getting your first job or
even a new job can be a big event in someone’s life. We all have a host of
stories to write about and they may be trivial to many people, but it’s not
trivial for the person that lived those times and experienced the events. Their
families and friends would often be amazed at what a seemingly ‘ordinary’
person has done with their life.
We all have these stories to write. All life stories are worth
writing about.
