A personal homepage is a World Wide Web site belonging to one person. It can be about that person or about something he or she is interested in.

A personal homepage may be as simple as a single page or may be as elaborate as an online database with gigabytes of data. Many Internet service providers offer a few megabytes of space for customers to host their own personal homepage.

The content of personal homepages varies and can, depending on the hosting server, contain anything that any other websites do. However, typical personal homepages contain images, text and a collection of "favorite links." Many also contain short biographies, résumés, and blogs.

Motivations

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Many people maintain a personal homepage because it is the most effective medium to express their opinions or creative endeavours that, otherwise, simply would not have an outlet. These types of sites may contain short fiction such as short stories or samples of artwork. Other netizens view the concept of a personal homepage with a more metaphysical bent, placing value in the concept of owning and "residing" in a "home" in cyberspace and on the World Wide Web. This can also extend to the ownership of personal domain names and the associated personal homepages and e-mail addresses connected to those domains, although with the advent of affordable web hosting fewer people own or manage their own personal servers. The vast majority of casual internet users tend to utilize personal homepages included in the free services provided by social networking sites such as MySpace and Blogspot.

Official celebrity sites

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Some celebrities, such as actor William Shatner, author Stephen King, and singer Barbra Streisand, have websites. Were they not famous, these sites would generally be considered personal homepages. Due to celebrity status of the subject and the existence of fan-created sites (of which the celebrity in question has no direct control) leads a personal site authorized by the celebrity and maintained by an individual or company directly associated with the celebrity to be labeled an "official website." This designator is often a seal of approval and an assurance to the public that the information provided on the site (including press releases, tour dates, and promotional materials) has been authored or approved by the celebrity in question. Some celebrities involved in criminal and civil trials, such as pop star Michael Jackson and media mogul Martha Stewart, establish official websites to issue statements to the press and to respond to statements and press releases issued by the prosecuting officals.

Most celebrity sites are created and maintained by marketing and web professionals employed by the celebrity or the celebrity's publicist; however, some celebrities, such as film director Roger Avary, actor Wil Wheaton, and video game developer John Romero, maintain their own official sites without professional help, although many of them still use third-party templates and blogging software.

Criticisms

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, takes a dim view of personal homepages. He once said, "They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in somebody's front yard than the home itself." Sir Berners-Lee's personal homepage^* is located within the World Wide Web Consortium's website.

A common pejorative term for a personal homepage is vanity site. This term is often used by other internet users who consider personal homepages with no real practical purpose or useful content to be pathologically narcissistic and a waste of bandwidth. Also, since many personal homepages are produced by individuals who have limited experience with HTML and graphic design, often these sites are created with WYSIWYG HTML editors (like Microsoft Office FrontPage or site-specific Web templates) and clipart graphics. This leads to what many consider to be poorly-designed, amateurish, and monotonous sites. These criticisms were most notably leveled at the personal homepages created by users of free web hosting services such as GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod in the mid to late 1990s. Some fear that social networking sites and products such as Google Page Creator will revive this trend.