The Mark Dykeman Web Niche

If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you’ll notice that although the blog has a nice enough layout with a couple of sidebars, it’s not very visually exciting.  I have only written a handful of posts that incorporate images or video of some kind.  My banner is the most colorful part of the blog, having recently been spiffed up.  On the whole this makes my blog something of a rarity, almost a bit retro.  So why have I chosen this path, the “road less traveled”, as it were?  Good question.  

The short answer is that I’m not a huge fan of additional media on web pages:  

a)       Extra media can slow down the time required to load your page.  Although I do have a relatively high speed account at home, I don’t have a new PC.  If I have to wait too long for my Web pages to load or for video to play, I’m not going to spend my time waiting for it.

b)       I’m not a big fan of images, audio or video.  I know some of it is quite good, but it’s not a “must have” quality attribute for a blog, unless it’s extremely relevant to the task at hand.  I’m really more interested in the words, not the shiny bells and whistles.    I’m a novice when it comes to working with multi-media files.  Unless I could find something free and pre-made, I found it difficult to justify spending time to create this content.  Sure, I have looked for free images and used them.  In the end there is a cost-benefit decision and right now it’s not leaning towards extra media. 

I look at all of these things as “nice to haves”.  My own blogging preference is to work in text.  My favorite kind of writing is the novel, followed by the short story and then non-fiction genres (excluding comic books, of course!)  That’s what I enjoy and it’s reflected in my blogging.

Pictures could enhance a good story, but they won’t make a story good.  The writer’s words should be able to describe a scene vividly enough so that pictures aren’t necessary.  I feel the same way about my blog posts.  I talk about ideas, popular culture, comic books, perception, communication, and business.  I try to tell stories or teach you something and I don’t usually need pictures to do that.  Although I’ve certainly tried YouTube  and enjoyed some of its content, that type of thing just doesn’t grab me like text. 

However, I’m not going to shut the door on using additional media, because I know it’s attractive to some of my readers and, as I said above, it can enhance the experience.  In fact, I’m going to research audio, video, and photo hosting for another project that I’m working on.  It may come in handy.  But I’m not going to depend on using additional media.