For the last 20 years of my professional life I’ve been promoting various websites, but only one site has consistently been number one. It’s a site that captures the unique spelling of my name and is my little corner of the internet. Back in November of 2003 my goals were very different. There was no promotion needed because this website had an audience of one…me. Before there was Facebook or Instagram, Gregrey.com was a place that featured photos and thoughts that were important to me.

Lacking any sophisticated design or technical expertise, I created a site that was designed to be as simple as possible. I’ve made few design enhancements beyond larger photos since the inception of the site and, in fact, still use the 2003 version of web software I first used.

Over the years I’ve been approached by consultants who can’t understand why I haven’t taken some simple steps to make the site more discoverable. Sure, I know what to do but that’s only relevant if the goal is to attract people. My goal is to create a visual scrapbook of my life and family.

I’m not the only one that actually accesses the site. Every week, or so my software tells me, there are a handful of people who stumble across the site. Maybe they searched on “Menlo School Prom 2011” Or something equally specific. At one point this was the number one site if you searching for “useless lump of dogmeat.”

It wasn’t until May of 2004 that I managed to put any navigational guides at the top of the page.

There was some controversy when I first published. There was one person who forbade me from publishing her daughter’s pictures because of what could happen if those pictures got in the hands of a pedophile. This confused me because each of us is photographed dozens of times a day and I was confident that if I published nothing that the pedophiles would not be slowed down in any way.

The homepage copy was written so that if someone was looking for me after many years, they could probably find me. Googling “Greg Harris” generates 43 million results and it’s difficult to find the right one. But Google “Greg Harris and my highschool or maybe my wife’s name and you should have no problem finding me. And yet 20 years later I remember no one send me an email saying “remember me?” I’ve certainly sought out a few of you!

Today the site has 1,662 unique pages and almost 18,000 individual photos. I always wondered that if someone in the family goes missing and the police ask for a quick photo they can use to help in the search, that I would be stuck trying to find the best one.