The term 'handmade' usually refers to objects made by hand or by using simple tools rather than machines. The result may be homely — as in a child's clay ashtray — or exquisite — as in a pair of bespoke brogues.

I evoke the term 'handmade web' to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations ; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.

Handmade web pages flourished in the mid-to-late-1990s , in the brief period after the academic web and before the corporate web. ‘Handmade’ is by no means the only or best term to define the web of this period.

In her essay, A Vernacular Web (2005), Olia Lialina describes the web of the mid-1990s as:
bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer ... it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions , professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
For more information on Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied's excellent research on the amateur web, see: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age: Digging through the Geocities Torrent.

I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to make a correlation between handmade web pages and handmade print materials, such as zines, pamphlets, and artists books.

I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to draw attention both to the manual labour involved in the composition of web pages , and the functioning of the web page itself as a 'manual', a 'handbook' , a set of instructions required for a computer program to run.

For most of its history web pages have been read on desktop or laptop computers. Readers have had the option of right-clicking on any page, selecting View Page Source, copying, pasting, and re-writing the source code. In this manner, readers become writers.

I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to draw attention to the physical body. Consider the manual labour carried out by the mouse hand in Daniel Eatock's The One Mile Scroll (2008) A few entries appear at the top of the screen - Denver, The Mile High City - my grandfather’s grave, Denver - after that we scroll and scroll. The hand is made to work. Through the labour of the body the virtual space of the browser window is transformed into an actual, physical distance.

Ironically, handheld devices have distanced us from the handmade web. In Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (2014), Lori Emerson argues: "The iPad works because users can’t know how it works" (15). Reading the web on an iPhone, iPad, or similar device, readers do not have the option of viewing the page source. The iPad provides consumers with access to materials created by others, but cannot easily be used as a tool in the handcrafting of new materials.

I evoke the term 'handmade web' to suggest slowness and smallness as a forms of resistance.

In today's highly commercialised web of multinational corporations, proprietary applications, read-only devices, search algorithms, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects.

The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways.