Saturday, December 30, 2000
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 *~GrrrrLy SiteS~*
Let's talk a little bit about what I like to call "cutesy girl webpages"... If you read my web-acquaintance Julie's very own opinion and experience about this, it's nearly identical to the experience and feelings I had coming across these sites for the first time.
I don't even recall how I ran into my first cutesy girl website. It happened sometime in 1999, though, after several years of some major surfing. I couldn't believe I never ran into them before because there were so MANY! After being so intrigued and inspired by a few of them, I almost launched a few silly looking cutesy girl pages of my own *bows her head in shame*, but would stop halfway and never put up the content so that I could start working on yet another layout.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
God, I'm so embarassed.
Very quickly, I realized that I was too old to be building GIRLY websites so I made this tamed and more mature looking layout. I got sick of the idea of using a bunch of possibly copyrighted anime character pictures and decorating my whole site around them, which was too easy to do...it's called color coordinating. And like Julie said, a lot of them really are the same format. You see some cute anime character and their whole layout is based on the colors of the "main" image, and everything is cutesy and a lot of the time uses frames and very small verdana, arial, or geneva font. I am very impressed with many of the pages especially when considering that some of these girls are only 13 years old and already able to make websites that are better looking than I could ever make. The only sad thing is how much of them seem to leech off of each other's ideas. You'll see a lot of common terms or menu options such as "You, Me, Site, WWW" and you will almost find a list of cliques they are involved in. Hey, I know I joined a few cliques myself.. but I don't think they're the cutesy girl ones.
A few more common things you will find on "cutesy girl webpages" if you've never seen them before...
- Image galleries of scans from stationary or screencaps from anime shows that they claim ownership to
- More backgrounds than you can imagine, many containing copyrighted cartoon images
- Lots of anime show info...which is good cuz it means content
- Occasionally you will see a site with a pop-up window format (similar to my example #2) that could fit in the palm of your hand; and if you maximized it, sometimes the page would look really screwed up.
- Adopted and adoptable pets (I've even made my own pets to give out for adoption, but haven't put them up)
- **LotS** of CuTe ^_Girly_^ typing~** and kawaii (japanese for cute) emoticons like ^( o _ o )^
Recently, I visited one of the cutesy sites I used to frequent called Mimi's Graphic Shop(which has apparently been taken over by someone else as the original owner decided she had better things to do in her life), and I read this flame letter that was sent to the site's webmaster which was the reason why I suddenly felt to urge to write a little bit about how I feel towards these webpages. Oh well, I think they're an interesting part of the web community, but I just can't be part of it... that's ok.. I'm OLD.
blabbed by Rosalyn Baumbach@4:21 AM
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