Intro The main goal of this letter is sort of to inspire and give you a starting point for designing your own online presence as an artist. I will express my opinion but thats not supposed to make you feel upset, it's more just me being angry at the state of online culture and art and how we express it this day in age. This was made just for you to read/skim all the way through and not a guide. But I will explain things a bit to give some direction if you do decide to change things. Motivation Artists (and even entrepreneurs) today mostly just use social media or other apps to post their work or promote their brand. Of course social media in all its forms is a great way to reach the most amount of people, storing lots of data (in the case of youtube) and make beneficial connections there is no denying that. But it incurs a cost. It means all your work is owned and stored by these big tech companies. Your art is stripped down and presented how the company wants with little customization. All your work is filtered through an algorithm made to keep people on their phones. All to make someone who doesn't care about you money. To me this is not how art was meant to be shared and viewed, and is a total regression to what the Internet empowered artists with before tech companies took over. So what do we do? ~ Make a website ~ I understand this initially sounds like a big undertaking (it can be if you want it to) but it is genuinely rewarding. Though, I assure you it is not that hard at all. The most important is your mindset going in is that you're just experimenting and having fun. This is very important as if you make it into some grand idea you'll never get anything done. With that I will go through what you need to start: First: A text editor. Notepad++: A very simple to understand program, and powerful; in fact most my comp sci profs use this program. VSCodium: Is another one I can recommend. Anything will do these are just programs I can speak to for a beginner. Second: A way to host your site. neocities.org: is pretty much the best way to get started in my opinion. There is many other ways you can host. I personally pay for my own virtual private server, run a web server, and upload my website content to that. You can also use github. There is many other sites in the same vein of neocities (it's up to preference). There is also the process of buying a domain (which is literally just paying for a domain name, aka just a name/title). For now if you're just starting out just use neocities. It is all you need and if you find yourself motivated you can go down the rabbit hole once you have something to host. Third: Some knowledge. This is really a choose your own adventure. I think neocities takes you through some basics so you might not have to worry about this much at all. Really all you need for website is an HTML page: index.html and a CSS style sheet: style.css. Way back when I wanted to learn this stuff I dabbled a bit with w3schools.com and that might be how you learn. You really only need to spend 10-20 minutes to get all you need. Really how I learned was just taking other peoples code haha. That pesky menu that comes up when you press F12 on a webpage shows the HTML and CSS code (in the Style Editor menu) of a given website. Your best bet is a simple site like the ones you see on neocities is actually a good starting point. Just copy that to give you some structure and edit it to your hearts content, the more simple the better (if you vaguely understand whats going on its a good structure to copy for you). You can also look for templates. Additionally, I'm not usually a prepotent for AI but in this case it is actually in service to you. An AI like ChatGPT can expediate this process massively, just ask it for a HTML template with maybe some custom things you want and it will give you a good base to modify and put up. When it comes to making your site start with the HTML code and then style it with CSS. Once thats done post it to your neocities. This is all too much! Lets focus this a bit. The best thing you can do is replace your fucking Linktree. I hate seeing this app idk how it works but just one look I can't stand it personally. Lets turn that repository of links into a webpage. Literally this can be a white page with links and it would load 100x faster than a Linktree and serve the exact same purpose. But theres a lot more you can do with it with just 10 minutes of work with some CSS. At the bottom of this letter is a template you can use. Finish that. Host is somewhere. Then post that link in your bio and thats much better than using whatever linktree is. Closing Hopefully this gives you some direction if you were vaguely thinking of starting a website. Or inspired you to do so. Ideally, I think as artists we have to move away from using social media in general. It all has just become such a drain. At the very least when we make these spaces we can point to them as OUR spaces and not with the label of Instagram or Youtube slapped onto it. Please, if you make a site you want to share or need some guidance/tips/help feel free to contact moridori@disroot.org. Thank you. ... Templates index.html style.css