what makes your site special

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I am very impressed by your website. Your writing involved me in the photographs and your stories of the men in them long before I realized the dual purpose of your website. You are promoting the escort's careers very effectively and demonstrating your considerable professional skill.

It is your writing, your attitude, your persona, which make your website rise above the clutter on the web. The biggest problem on the web today: getting the attention of the public.

You are concerned about your photographic skills and your ability to create websites. You invest a lot of yourself in these two areas. However I want you to know that you have an additional talent which supports the other two beautifully. I m not sure you are aware how important your writing skill is to the impact of your website.

In presenting the escorts as you do, you serve them well. And you serve your goals well. They are given a human scale. They are vulnerable people. A bit shy. Not at all like the escorts you discussed elsewhere. Apparently intuitively, you have made them rise "above the clutter" of the web and become memorable individuals you have given your website a bit of a narrative. Will they come back for more pictures? We will have to wait and see.

Your writing style seems to flow easily. I did not feel manipulated nor did I see anything that seemed forced. That is a gift and I wanted you to be aware of it.

I am considering starting a website on other subject matter and studying your website has allowed me to see some options I had not considered before. You are a very talented man and I hope the success you are seeking will come to you very soon.

-- anonymous (anon@nowhere.org), October 30, 1999

Answers

Dear anonymous,

Thanks for the lavish praise of 'light[squared]'.

The dual purpose thing of advertising the escorts, it's not something I benefit financially from, just seemed like something I could give back in return for their modelling for me. I don't really have any money so this kind of barter economy is how I manage to keep doing the artwork I want to and building my portfolio with what few resources I've got.

The third purpose - and the main reason for the text - is to chart my progress towards getting employment, and in finding models to pose without a fee, setting up shoots, and so on, to help other people who want to break into this kind of field - because I've not been able to find much helpful advice or pointers so am kind of stumbing around working it all out by trial and error, and I wanted to share my experience and maybe inspire other people who have ambitions but no clue how to fulfil them.

If you need any Web design help, make sure to look thru my links page (from Light2), there are some excellent (free) design sites listed & I'm always adding more.

Also if you'd like me to give you feedback or suggestions for your site once you start uploading it I'd be happy to, for what it's worth.

The biggest problem on the web today: getting the attention of the public.

Absolutely, the signal-to-noise ratio now is horrifying. In just the last three years that I've been online the changes have been as dramatic as watching Ancient Greece terraformed into Strip-Mall, USA.

Due to the sheer impossible morass of choices and blatant misrepresentation, anyone at all savvy knows better than to waste time clicking a link, no matter how good it sounds; so the number of visitors to my pages keeps declining even though I'm producing better and better work.

Search engines are now 95% useless. The only way I ever find any decent new sites is by word of mouth from very trusted sources, or blind luck. Tip: getting a monkey to type random letters into the URL field seems to yield statistically better results than keyword-search methods.

People used to complain about the word "gay" being sullied and perverted; I think the loss of meaning of the word "free" is far more disturbing. You just tune it out now online, it's a purely decorative design element.

The forces of banality are so much harder to combat than those of evil because instead of an unambiguous meaty target it's like fighting an infinitely regenerating army composed of elevator musaz and syrup.

Hey, I'm rambling and being snobbish.

Thanks again for your encouragement. My writing style's technically appalling but seems to communicate effectively, which is all that really matters unless you indulge in vices like poetry.

Best wishes, Paul

-- Paul FR Hamilton (ph@innocent.com), October 30, 1999.


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