I registered the domain name for Siteway on April 23, 1996. I was nineteen years old. In a move that echoed my early preference for starting with the title of a story before plot, so too the domain name came first. I remember spending all day in the basement of the Social Science Centre, at the University of Western Ontario. It was the closing month of my second academic year and while everyone else was getting ready for final exams, I was researching domain names. I wasn’t looking for a real word, necessarily. Something neat. Effective. I can still remember the feeling of finding that siteway.com was still available. I’ve always liked it as a domain name because it’s relatively short, to the point, and memorable. ¶ When I first launched Siteway (which I referred to as siteway.com until 1998), it was home to my nascent graphic design portfolio. I’d done a few book covers. A logo for a friend. I’d conceived the name, Siteway, in part to reflect my interest in building web sites, professionally. And while I moved away from the web design world as a trade, I’ve adopted, nevertheless, the practice of obtaining new domains and building content around them. I still owe a lot to those early web design days. ¶ I redesigned Siteway three more times before moving to the blog format in May 2000. Since that time, Siteway has moved from an idiosyncratic blog with pictures toward something close to a distilled representation of my art practice. It’s both the workshop and showroom floor, a balance I very much enjoy. ¶ Around the time I redesigned Siteway for Blogger I had the idea that a family of sites would give me the real estate metaphor I was searching for, online. Phelts was born in 2000. Tonicville in 2002. Coastalmatic in 2006. Most recently I’ve added Le Gastro and Polotype to the Siteway League. There’s also my online print shop, Illoprints, and my playground for animation, Illovision. In early 2009, after moving my business and life to London, Ontario, I launched my web comic Fraser, Ontario—at fontario.com—which continues in the Siteway tradition of, if I might say, nifty domain names. ¶ Some of the art moves I make are impulsive, and some are deliberate. I try to reign in even the impulsive ones, after the fact, and this goes a long way to explain the different forms that Siteway and her league of sites have taken. These days my focus is illustration. The concept of it, the practice of it, the development of it, the future of it. Watch for that development, as always, on Siteway.

Ant.

Photograph by Rannie Turingan Photography.
Taken in November 2008 in my then office on Spadina Ave. in Chinatown, Toronto, for BlogTO.