Personal Sites dead?

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A few days ago, venerable web designer (and standards advocate) Jeffrey Zeldman posted “The vanishing personal site”. Jeffrey lamented the fact that a lot of people who, in the past, might have made personal web sites are instead sharing their thoughts, ideas and creations on social networking sites that they don’t control. His post inspired an important conversation across the blogosphere and in media like Wired, which asked the question, “Is the all-in-one personal website headed for extinction?”

Paul Boag has has relaunched Boagworld with an interesting take, mostly in agreement with Zeldman. I have to disagree. I would argue that we will continue to see personal sites for some time to come but that they will be based on CMS systems like Wordpress or Movable Type.

Like a marketing department in any company you need to figure out how to use facebook , flickr etc to bring traffic to your personal site. Once visiors are on your site you have the opportunity to promote yourself allot more than you would on the one size fits all facebook type sites.

The Jody Ferry example in the Zeldman article is just lazy.

2008 Gareth Murran.