Beinghunted x Liganova on Stephen Mann

Alongside Liganova, Beinghunted are currently exploring fashion/design website creators in order to gain a further insight of what goes on behind the scenes, right from creation. The pair begin their series of features with Stephen Mann and his online-journal “thenonplace.com”.

Jörg: When did you start using the Internet and what was your initial motivation or what was the main reason for it?

Stephen: I started using the internet in the mid 90s. I have always been intrigued about it as it gave me access to the outside world – coming from a quite village all I was ever interested in was city life – the internet meant I could pursue my interests and find things out and generally the most interesting to me was communicating with other people who were in to the same stuff as me. When you live in a small place it’s often unlikely you know many people who are into the same things.

When did you set up your own site and what was the motivation for this move?

I set it up when I graduated university (the less we mention that, the better) at its inception it was going to be a place where I could profile things I was into – designers etc. – and I guess that’s what it has become. The only real change is that it became personal rather than commercial. I found I didn’t want to report or write about things I didn’t physically own or experience, so over time it really just became a visual diary of the things I buy/do I like it that way as it stays true to me.

At what point or through which occurrence did you notice that somebody out there was taking notice of your site?

Every so often I would get an email saying ‘I just found your site I really like this etc. where did you get it?’ Or another similar question or sometimes a link to something someone thinks I would be into (these are my favorites). It’s really nice as I took a choice not to link to other sites from mine, purely as I didn’t want to play the ‘blog’ game as the site wasn’t about ‘hits’ it was just me and my things, and I believe that’s why some people enjoy it, others don’t but you can’t please everyone.

Your site does not have any sort of commercial aspect to it – would you like to make money with it and open it up for advertising?

Not with this site as it’s not what its set up for. It would cease to be what it is if I had to think about it as a business. I have other web interests that I’m working on that I plan to have commercial use as this will be part of their conception so it won’t affect the message.

If so, do you think that the way you publish might change?

Obviously it would depend on the advertiser or the way of generating income, but I would have to post more to start with which ultimately would mean I would have to stop just talking about things that are mine or write about every little thing I buy which would be mundane for both me and the reader.

For all those interested, you can read the full interview here.