95 reasons for having your own website in 2026 ~ Bell Kiosk

Bell Kiosk

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95 reasons for having your own website

random

to write for oneself

to post quietly

to have a home on the open web

to keep a record of the days1

to learn how the web works

to make a friend2 across the world

to have a place to keep memories3

to learn HTML

to write lists

to keep a daily writing practice

to lean into feeling naive4

to understand more about your relationship to yourself, to others, or to the world

to write poetry

to use the web as a medium and material5

to ground oneself

to remember

to make a place for conviviality6

to create the community that you didn't have growing up

to make a photo album

as a place to rage

to recreate your old blogspot or tumblr

as a love letter

to keep

to use social media7 a little less

to post for oneself

to be fragile

to ground8 yourself

to collect things and display them on a shelf together

to keep things unfinished and open ended

to contemplate your own mortality

as an activity to do with a friend, "lets make a website together"

out of boredom

to keep notes

as a medium to make a movie

an excuse to go to the park9

because vibe coding only gets you so far

for the love of the web

to pretend that it's 2010 again

to pretend that it's 2000 again

to become an island

to become an archipelago with your friends

as a form of prayer

to remember that a website is just files & folders

as a form of play

because you want to publish offline

to feel in control

to feel out of control

to stay unstructured

to think through a big life decision

to be your own localhost

to keep an index of colors

to go deep

to feel more alive when interacting with a computer

to publish without social pressure

to keep the like counter at 0

to troll yourself

to make infinite scrolling optional

to bring guest books back

to write for yourself

to show others what the web could be

to world the world

as a wish

to retain the aura10 of your work

to write your own wikipedia entry

to remove the cynicism11 from the reason

to stay grounded in the seasons12

to own what you publish

after reading an essay about what a website could be13

so that the nerds don't have the only voice on the www

as a form of care14

because it has very little to do with brutalism15

because it feels good to be alive16

as a way to find love

as a form of protest

as a radical statement

to have a clean room

to be in motion

to recharge

to draw

to try out POSSE17

as a way to go forward by looking back18

to bring web rings back

to create bridges to other activities19

to feel young and old at the same time

to archive everything20 you've ever done

to own your own instagram grid21

to learn how to juggle22

because no other medium is a container for images, audio, video, text, time, hyperlinks

it's still a largely unexplored artistic medium

to make a soup23

to create a scene report

to document a ufo sighting

to walk with

as a way to make a custom home screen for your phone

to publish your music outside the confines of the platforms

… do we need a reason to website?

everythingthathappened.today by Anna Marl.↩︎

websitesite.xyz, by Jisu Lee.↩︎

Memory site by Elliott Cost.↩︎

Naive Weekly, a newsletter by Kristoffer Tjalve.↩︎

The phrase "the web as a medium and material" is credited to Kristoffer Tjalve.↩︎

Extra Practice, a shared studio in Rotterdam.↩︎

Dandelion Coffee, a coffee bar in Buxton, Derbyshire.↩︎

home.elliott.computer, Elliott Cost’s homepage.↩︎

One Minute Park by Elliott Cost.↩︎

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935).↩︎

motherfuckingwebsite.com, a manifesto by Barry T. Smith.↩︎

Seasons in Pentameter by Laurel Schwulst, Marie Otsuka, and Tiger Dingsun.↩︎

Laurel Schwulst, "My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?", The Creative Independent.↩︎

A Garden of Care Tools by Gijs de Boer.↩︎

Brutalist Websites, curated by Pascal Deville.↩︎

"Alive Internet Theory", Naive Weekly by Kristoffer Tjalve.↩︎

POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), an IndieWeb model.↩︎

"Go back to go forward", by Elliott Cost.↩︎

Projecting Life by Gijs de Boer and Elliott Cost.↩︎

Everything site by Elliott Cost.↩︎

Camera by Elliott Cost.↩︎

juggling4ever, a juggling how-to page.↩︎

fittererr.com, Sarah Fitterer's website by Gijs de Boer.↩︎