11/14/02: (basic design of the project)

We knew we had to get moving on the website. Without a website, we had no script. No performance. So.

The Website : Here are just a few of the questions we encountered in dealing with the website's construction. While we thought it was important to give the website a direction, (to a certain extent, predict what kind of responses we’d receive) we wanted to devise a structure that was as open as possible. We decided on the general “tell your story” framework… Four or five questions and a submission form… A kind of confessional sphere. We had to tell people about the project. Warn them that any response could be performed. And construct a forum so that users could read and comment on each other's responses.

Design of the website? Well, that wasn't easy...

Since December there has been not one--not two--but three distinct versions of epithelium.org. My lack of web savy and HTML played a significant role in the utter confusion of the website.

First, my then-boyfriend Alex designed a Flash page (pictured above). It was pretty, but most people we directed to the site didn't have flash plug-ins (even though we had a link to get it, the MORONS). Also the Flash fonts were too small, the layout was complicated, and our descriptions were vague. Jesus. It was messy. So after many long long arguments with Al, I launched a new site a month later. This time, HTML frames and very little visual pleasure. Another month later, I rehauled it with better images and better code. It's still not as sexy as Alex's page, but shit, I had so many other things to think about...

How do we incite conversation between people that don’t normally talk?

This was always a problem. Still is. Even when people got on the site and submitted responses. Our forum got no action. I expected this--Al didn't. People didn't have a good reason to come back to the site and read people's responses. The forum was just a bunch of random people answering random questions. Who cares about that? We tried to create "featured users" in order to draw people into conversations that we were interested in performing. Failure. We tried adding real-time text messaging. Failure. In fact, we still don't know how to get people talking on the site.

What makes people talk very personally?

We worried about this. But as the submissions started rolling in, we cared less and less. People love to talk about themselves. And the web offers a kind of anonymity that gives people a certain freedom. Some users told the painful truth about themselves: suicide attempts, broken marriages, getting old, being young, sex, STDs--they told us everything. Some lied: there was Nandovee who told us about smacking his bitches around, Thud Nugget, whose best friend peed on his cat, and slutty swan who claimed to look like an adolescent version of Cindy Crawford. The lies and the truth were both good.

And obviously, we had to get people there, talking, telling stories…

Getting people there, on the site, was difficult. After we forced every person we knew to go to the site, there were enormous gaps. We had 30 users. While that seems like a lot, it didn't satify Al. Jimmy spammed 700 people on livejournal. That produced problems and answers. Those livejournalers got pretty pissed--but we recieved 20 entries in two days. We also got linked off some theater websites. We also gave out a million flyers and sent flyers to our friends in different cities. In the end we had 101 users. Yeah. I'm kinda proud. For the most part, this was Al's doing. She worked her ass off. 101 is her number. I would have been happy with 30, but then again, I wasn't the one that would have to perform these people.