attack_laurel has gone and done it again. Her latest discussion of websites and how they can impact a person's chances for an award in the SCA sparked a whole novel's worth of a reply from me. It's really a good thing to discuss, in my opinion... There ARE people (who are not Laurels, by and large) who have heard rumors that certain chapters/people within the Order of the Laurel who believe that having a website is tantamount to professional suicide.

I want to state, for the record, that this is complete bullshit. I also must state, for the record, that I am not a Laurel, but I think the reason for that has very little, if anything, to do with my website. In fact, I want to make it clear that having my website has only ever helped me to connect with other peers (big and small P, alike). I seriously doubt I would be half the costumer I am right now if it weren't for my website, and the websites of others. I fall into the category of having both a research website and a "body of work" website, which I think is also important... It's not just about showing off my costumes, but it's also not just about words on a page and theories without experiments to prove or disprove or at least lend credence to my ideas.

And here's where I basically copy everything I wrote in comment to attack_laurel's entry, because I think I said it best over there:

As you know, I've had a costuming website online since 1997; back in that day, it was Drea Leed, Melissa Heischberg (sempstress.org) and myself, and then a handfull of meta-link sites like Milieux and the Costumer's Manifesto. As far as I could tell, Drea, Missa and I were the only ones putting up genre-specific information, and even then, the first few years of Drea's site were entirely research-based (I could be wrong about it just being us, because this was obviously pre-Google and social networking, so finding other websites was a tricky thing back in the wild days of early websites). Drea didn't start including pictures of her own work until the early-2000s, and by that time Missa and I had already started doing dress diaries of our works in progress (I want to say that it was Missa who coined the "dress diary" phrase, since I don't remember being aware of it in that teeny little online costuming community until she started using it- And she was ahead of me in the dress diary arena by a year at least).

I think having my website (in all its various incarnations: Sewing The Seeds of Rebellion, The Elizabethan Lady and now Mode Historique) has HUGELY helped me... Not only to connect with other costumers, and to show off my work, but to give myself name recognition. This is valuable both inside and outside the context of the SCA, honestly. Ok, maybe my research isn't current, and maybe I'm wrong on a few accounts, but my stuff is out there and people are free to use it as a spring board for their own ideas. I think it is the neatest feeling in the world to have someone come up to me at an event and tell me how much they love following my website... And it's even neater when they're a Laurel! That's at least a partial credit to my online body of work, and it makes it much easier to reach out to EVERYONE, not just people within my Kingdom or Principality or local shire.

Hell, without my website, I might never have met Missa, or jenthompson, or myladyswardrobe, or silverstah, or demode, or realm_of_venus, or many, many, many others. And websites can be a fantastic icebreaker, too... I might have been too shy to approach callistotoni without having seen her work showcased on Festive Attyre. All of my closest friends came to me through my website, in fact... demode, trystbat, sweetladykt... Never would have met them if it hadn't been for Mode Historique.

All that aside, there are ways to fuck yourself over with a website... If you have a hard time keeping a neutral tone, or if you have really shitty research skills and refuse to listen to any critique that could help you improve your research, then yeah, that might be more of a hinderance than a help.

I also think there is some credence to the *feeling* that websites can be seen as "showing off" rather than as an educational tool (I say "feeling", because I've only ever heard unsubstantiated rumors about that), because there could be people (maybe even Laurels) who believe that the web is a completely frivolous waste of time and the only work that should be worth considering is the work that they can hold in their grubby little hands. That's perfectly valid. I think that physical evidence of your body of work is crucial, and a person should never expect to be recognized for anything on *just* a website. Even if your art is strictly research-oriented, you should be publishing your articles in TI or CA, in addition to keeping an updated web presence. The Laurel is based on the academic model of "publish or perish", and therefore there are certainly members of the order who come from the Old School way of thinking. But that's as close as I've ever come to seeing anything of a disdain for websites.