MattHeisig.com | Web Design and Development in Knoxville, TN

For the past year I’ve had to live every web designer’s worst nightmare. It’s what we all dread, what keeps us awake at night cursing our career choice and wishing for simpler times. You know, the curse of trying to satisfy the most difficult client imaginable: yourself.

Hyperbolic, yes, but it has sure felt like that recently. I’ve spent bits and pieces of my spare time over the last year trying to design and develop my own blog and portfolio site. The process would seem to go something like this:

1. Be struck by a bolt of inspiration for the best design ever.
2. Begin the design process in Photoshop with furious resolve.
3. Burn out after a few days.
4. Return to the design two weeks later and declare it outdated, below standards or just a bad idea.

Sometimes if I was really fortunate a small part of it would get sliced and actually see the light of HTML and CSS. Lurking somewhere in the nether-reaches of my hard drive are six or seven different design mockups that were all abandoned in various stages of completion.

For whatever reason I don’t appear to suffer from this anywhere else in life. At work, on side projects and when I’m just goofing around I am somehow far more focused and able to get the job done. Apparently attempting to define yourself through a website is far more problematic than helping a client define themselves. I guess it’s the whole “You are your own worst critic” deal.

I think I simply had unrealistic expectations of what my personal site should be. I’m a designer and this would be my showcase, therefore it had to be nothing short of revolutionary.

The Turning Point

I stumbled across a post (which I can no longer find) at the Less Everything Blog about embracing the iterative design process. They had recently released an accounting program for designers and took the approach that you should create the best product you can as quickly as possible and release it immediately to start gathering feedback. Improve, update, improve, update. The classic iterative approach. And the approach I took almost everywhere else in life.

It hit me: for whatever reason I have a complete mental block when it comes to my own site. I’m operating under a “Big Bang” release approach with my personal site, when I don’t really take that approach with anything else. I expected to develop the ultimate blog with every feature I wanted and perfectly arranged in the most beautiful synthesis of art, technology and usability known to man.

Then and there I resolved to produce the best site I could in as short a time as was reasonable. I initially declared I would create the site in eight hours. After eight hours went by, I revised that to a weekend. And later fudged that to about a week.

I actually kept it to a week, though. I also had to resolve that I could only do this in genuinely spare time. No taking days off, no staying up until 4 a.m. and no ignoring my family. Essentially I needed to turn out a site within a week while only using select hours in the evening and on the weekends.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present…

Yep, this is it. The result of forcing myself to do the best job I could in a week and then releasing into the wild. I’m still here, life still goes on, and this site ain’t perfect. That’s half the fun, though. I now get to go to work on the feature list that’s sitting on my whiteboard at home and start fixing the things I had to ignore or compromise on and adding the things I never had time to add.

In the coming weeks I hope to explore this more fully and hopefully detail what I’ve decided to add, change or kill off and why.