The Beauty of a Personal Website

Welcome to my first post of my new website. Over the next while, I am switching to this new platform in order to be able to post to my website more frequently. The state of major social media platforms has caused them to no longer be something I felt brought value into my life, and the lack of control of my data and how I could represent myself on them led me to desire something a little more free… like a personal website!

I wanted a place to be able to share all of my creative things, my photography, design, words, all on the fly without having to sit down and fight with a clunky website editor. This site is made using a platform called Blot.im, where all I have to do to post is drop photos or text documents into a folder, and it displays those files as an entry on my site. That simple.

My website has always been an incredibly important part of my creative representation, it’s gone through several eras while I’ve done the same. If you’ve known me for a while, you’ll know that I’ve constantly worked on and updated my site to closely resemble me and what I’m in to at the time. From my original photography days, to my (current) design days, and now my design-words-and-photography days, here’s a little glimpse into the history of my website designs.

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My First-Ish Site

The original alecgettert.com… then called alecgettert.myportfolio.com as my high school budget certainly did not allow for me to purchase a domain quite yet. Back then, I was huge into photography, which is something you’ll see I’m starting to get connected with again. I’m still quite proud of my work from back then, I even started my own digital photography “studio” called Snapse Photos. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized doing photography for money wasn’t my thing.

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My First Go at Being a Designer

You know what, this site still looks cool as fuck. For freshman year of college, and for my limited amount of work to actually showcase, this was great. I was obsessed with this edgy, grainy, and neon branding for myself. It represented me at that time quite well. This site was still made with adobe portfolio, and by this time I think I was playing around just about as much as you could with that platform. I might have to revisit some of these projects again, they were so cool… but just look at that awful kerning and line spacing on that Terminal project!

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Returning to My Roots

After some time, and some mellowing out as I grew up a little, you’ll notice this website goes back to a similar vibe as my original. I never loved this site, but it was the one that landed me two internships and was overall just very easy to maintain and post to. I never felt too proud of this iteration, but it worked!

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Putting on Some Big Boy Shoes

If you’re reading this article before I finally completely switch over, this will be my current website. Made during the early part of my senior year, this site was some of the best I could do. It was home to my favorite projects I did through my degree, and had an overall much more slick, professional design to it, but still kept true to my love of simple web design. I’m still quite happy with this site, but unfortunately the platform it’s running on is just too difficult to maintain, and it runs slow/clunky if you run it on poor connections or browsers that are not Chromium based.

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A Blank Slate

And that brings us here. My website has always been a representation of who I am as an artist, creative person, photographer, designer, whatever you want to call me. The freedom a personal website offers you to be yourself is something that excites me, and so I wanted to have a place that consolidates everything, and something that is so easy to post to that I won’t miss my social media flow.

I am thankful that we live in an era where I can look back on all of my previous work and websites, even if they are no longer hosted, and that I can easily create a website like this to fit my needs. I am excited to share this space with those of you who are here for me, and I seriously encourage you to set up your own personal site.

Note: I want to add that no writing on this site is or will ever be generated by artificial intelligence. I am not opposed to AI as a tool in professional settings, however it does not bring me joy to use it in my personal work, nor do I feel there is any way I can use it to represent myself as a human ethically. Me, and the world I get to live in are more beautiful than anything a computer can generate for me.