An oral history of elainechen.com

I built my first website after I graduated university in 1998, using basic HTML. (Not even CSS!) On Geocities, of course. I knew a bit of Photoshop from my time designing ads at the Queen’s University Journal, but I don’t remember where I learned HTML. Probably from a boyfriend, and a nascent internet. 

(Note the printout of RGB codes in the image above. I found a bunch of HTML reference printouts in my bedroom closet at my parents’ house a while ago. Yes, I realize the humour in printing out RGB swatches in black and white.)

I was an art grad, so I had mostly photos of my artwork. I remember I’d used thumbnails of my face as navigation (the same graphics used in my mixed media pieces), and my parents were highly concerned about putting photos of myself online even though they were abstracted. Oh, how times have changed.

My next website was more robust. I bought elainechen.com (sorry to the other Elaine Chens out there). The same boyfriend helped me with basic PHP. I even had a CSS stylesheet. By that time I was more advanced with Photoshop, from a digital photo production gig that eventually led to a graphic artist job in a corporate marketing department. This time I had art and design work for my portfolio.

Fast forward some years and another boyfriend later. My website needed an overhaul and a way to prioritize recent web design work and Flash animation, yet still include old artwork that I was proud of. Also, I published my first novel, and was drawing stuff to put on POD sites like Spoonflower and RedBubble. So how to architect all my output in a way that relevant audiences could find what they were looking for?

Enter WordPress, which I bludgeoned into submission with my rudimentary HTML. I took advantage of its blog-style setup to present work in a chronological fashion, and also used categories for navigation. It was a good solution that met my needs. I didn’t actually blog much, because why blog when you can easily keep people updated with tweets? Oh, how times have changed.

(And then some Viagra-selling hacker overtook my website because I wasn’t keeping WordPress updated, so I scrapped it all and put together a simple one-pager from a template. Lost my search ranking, boo.)

Which brings us to v5.0 (I think?) of elainechen.com. The site’s goals have changed. The design portfolio has gone by the wayside, because everything I do now is NDA, and my previous work is out of date. Also, after 20 years of experience I (probably) don’t need a portfolio if I had to get another design job. I have enough references to vouch that I am a warm-enough body to throw at Figma. I don’t have to promote myself as a designer anymore.

However, the game has changed for writers. Unless you’re Elena Ferrante, you’re encouraged to get on the self-promotion train as marketing support from publishers varies.

So this is me, switching completely to my writer hat and wrestling with WordPress, this time without boyfriend tech support. Times have changed again! I still know Photoshop pretty well, but Canva has shaped the aesthetic for book marketing, and designers now use Figma for UI. And with the rise and fall of various social media platforms, we’re back to blogging like it’s 1999. 

All aboard the self-promotion train. Woo woo!