10

My daughter is just 4 months old. Being a software developer, I register two domains on her name, as soon as her name is finalized.

Now I was looking for some really eye catching kid website template. To my surprise, I didn't find many. Again few of my friends and relatives suggested not to put her website online, at least not too early.

Since I also not found many kids website/templates on net, now I'm forced to think again, if it is a good idea to create a kids website?

Are there any other parents who created website for their kids? If yes, are there some kids website templates available anywhere. Google seems not helping me a lot in this case.

4
  • Not sure if this is really a parenting question as much as it is a web design question.
    – DA01
    Sep 10, 2012 at 19:24
  • 1
    @DA01: I'm currently composing an answer on the part about "is it a good idea to create a kids website?" Sep 10, 2012 at 19:34
  • 2
    First thing I did was nab [email protected] address ;)
    – Benjol
    Sep 20, 2012 at 7:24
  • 2
    I did that for my wife, before we got married - bit of a geeky wedding present. With the kids I just have their name at my domain :-)
    – Rory Alsop
    Sep 20, 2012 at 19:07

5 Answers 5

9

For website templates I'd like to suggest asking on the excellent Wordpress SE site. But that's not really your point.

A decade ago it seemed common to create photo websites about their offspring. Back then, a website for Junior looked like a cool and sweet thing to do. Several of my fellow geeks did this. None of their sites are still online.

With all of today's bad press about misuse of material on the Internet (also or particularly related to small children), such websites seems to have disappeared completely. The Internet is a scary place, and protecting the child's privacy has become increasingly important. These days people either are completely unaware of any privacy issues, or they only post material that is either about only their own person, or sufficiently anonymized.

In summary, a public website about a child is probably not a good idea.

Alternatively, you could have a password-protected website, or use social networks that have good ways of limiting the material to only be available to desired people, like Google+. This becomes a question about technology though, for which Superuser.com is much better suited.

7
  • 1
    While protecting privacy is important, I don't think children's web sites disappeared due to that as much as it is that it's simply easier to use other social media today to handle that task much easier...facebook, instagram, flickr, etc are all a lot easier to set up and share your kids photos and the like with friends and family.
    – DA01
    Sep 10, 2012 at 19:51
  • 3
    I hear this vague worry about misuse of information often coupled with allusions to pedophiles being sleazy or advertisers poaching the photos. I honestly don't understand any concern with images of a child being online; I can see absolutely no risk to this whatsoever beyond taking your child to public spaces where others may view or photograph them. Could you please explain to me what you're worried might happen and how it would actually harm your child? I ask you because I have a lot of respect for your opinions and I can't simply dismiss this from you as irrational nonsense. Sep 10, 2012 at 19:56
  • @DA01: You're right. "Back in the day" it was the geeks building websites, perhaps because the kid was an excuse to build something cool. These days, it's one-click easy to do that (self-hosting, or using sites such as you mention), so it's no longer particularly exciting to do. Sep 10, 2012 at 21:18
  • 3
    @WilliamGrobman: Thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. Yeah I realize that I'm mentioning "naked" in two out of two comments now, but I'm just saying what I see. I've seen a few kids websites that contained at least one or two revealing photos (I mean completely nude). The kid might not enjoy having that dug up when the teenage years come around. I don't mind being at someone's third birthday party and all the kids run naked around the lawn sprinkler, but I wouldn't want photos to be made public on the Internet either. Photos of my kid, dressed in a playground? I'm fine with that. Sep 10, 2012 at 21:23
  • 1
    @TorbenGundtofte-Bruun I see the value of respecting their privacy. I had just never imagined someone posting that personal of an image in public. Thanks for explaining what tangable problems there can be. Sep 10, 2012 at 22:41
4

I'd advise against this. We created a blog soon after telling our friends and family that we were expecting. For the months during pregnancy, it proved to be popular with them, as they could keep up to date with progress etc.

In the first year or so after baby was born, we posted pictures as she grew up. However, I came across one posted on another site (thanks to Google alerts) without our written permission. Maybe the copyright notice wasn't obvious enough - but the offending site hasn't responded to several emails asking politely for them to remove our pictures.

In the last few years, social networks have become the place to discuss your baby and share pictures/videos of them developing, rather than a public website. Just ensure your privacy settings are private enough.

3

There's nothing inherently dangerous about it. Unless you live on some sort of secluded compound, strangers will probably figure out what she looks like when you go out in public. Just use common sense about what you reveal. "She loves to swing in our back yard at 123 Main Street while I take a nap every day" is probably not advisable. Yes, that's an absurd example, but I have seen people split personal information like that into 3 or 4 posts that they would never combine into one.

That being said, the reason these kinds of websites aren't that popular anymore is that it's impossible to get anyone to read them. At the very least you should be linking your posts from Facebook. Eventually things happen like wanting to share something with only one side of the family, and most people just slip to using Facebook full time.

1

I am old enough to have been in my twenties when the internet and personal computers became achievable to the general public in the 1990s. I was enthusiastic about this and posted all kinds of things under my real name. I can still read most of this today, and much of what I posted is extremely embarrassing, if not detrimental to my career. I have spent many hours and days, trying to delete or have deleted the tracks I left on the net. If my parents had published a website about myself as a child, I would never talk to them again.

3
  • Do you think they would have been as (no offense!) naive and thoughtless about it as you were? Maybe they would, back then, but how about today's parents? Sep 20, 2012 at 7:15
  • This is an interesting topic in and of itself! The internet came along in my college years and I was lucky to have a professor that scolded me for something I said on a mailing list that made the rounds all the way back to her (nothing offensive, but it was 'jumping rank' in a way that would rile the university). So I was able to learn that lesson early. But it's definitely something parents need to clearly explain to their kids. We now live in an age where everything you say and do will stick around a lot longer that it ever did before.
    – DA01
    Sep 20, 2012 at 17:56
  • Would YOU want all your neighbors, your boss, your coworkers and, if you have a high profile job like CEO of some international company or president of the US, the whole world to know and comment on your childhood images and very likely the stories about how you still peed in your bed at six that your parents posted with them? My concern is not about the kids not taking care of themselves, but of the parents not caring for the future public image of their children.
    – user3140
    Sep 20, 2012 at 18:35
1

We have a Facebook page for our daughter. It is only accessible by our friends and family. We use it to post photos and videos and the occasional status update (sometimes even typed by our daughter).

We did this because all of her relatives (except her parents) live abroad, scattered over Australia, Germany and Sweden. Our relatives really appreciate the chance to see our little one grow.

We'd be less comfortable making this public, and we only accept "friend requests" from people we actually know.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .