Funny story about my personal website

I really need to overhaul my personal website, PhoebeRoberts.com. I slapped it together years ago so that it would exist in case anybody wanted to look up me or my work, telling myself I'd improve it later when I had a minute. But I never really got around to it, and as it is, it doesn't look very slick. I'd like to make it look a little more aesthetic and professional. I'm no web designer, but I did put together MrsHawking.com and it looks okay, so I can probably do a little better than the thrown-together version I've got now.

Now I'll tell you a kind of funny story about my personal website. A while ago I wrote a post on Captain America's hair in The Winter Soldier, and it's easily the most popular post on there. It gets more hits and comes up in more Internet searches than any of the others. Sure, it's partially because it's the only one that deals with a popular branded character. But it gets a LOT of hits specifically from people searching his hairstyle in that film.

But what cracks me up is probably NONE of these people are searching for what that post actually is-- an exegesis on what that styling tells us about the character from a narrative standpoint. I'd bet money that every single person searching that wants information on how to imitate that hairstyle, or what to tell their stylist in order to get it. That post has NOTHING in how to do that hair, only what I think that hair "means" as character information. Which is interesting to only the very tiny subset of the population that cares about the semiotics of costume design as a storytelling tool.

It cracks me up that the far and away most popular post in the site is probably enjoyed by literally zero of the people that were drawn to it. 😝