Ask any ad agency and you’ll find that creating their own website is so much harder than building ones for their clients. Sure, part of the equation is that a client website is a paying gig, but in the grand scheme of things, ideally the agency’s website will pay for itself in new business while getting to show off their programming and design chops.
Recognizing that I haven’t touched my own website in over 3 years, I’ve started wandering through the many forests of themes looking for inspiration. Knowing that Apple no longer supports my easy-as-pie iWeb program that I used to build my current site, I’ve started looking around at all the options available.
Squarespace looks like a viable choice, but I’m already paying for web hosting. RapidWeaver is something I actually used before iWeb, so that can always be an alternative. And there’s WordPress (which I use for this blog) that has a bunch of options available, some free, some for a fee. But playing around with it this past weekend made me realize that being stuck in the land of spreadsheets and client hand-holding has left my design and programming skills feeling a little….rusty. I stare at things that should make sense and only come up with more questions. But by gawd, I’ll plow through and figure it out, right? (I should mention that my normal pattern is to NEVER ease into anything….which really causes a lot of unnecessary aches and pains when I apply this “jump head first, think about the consequences later” mentality.)
It’s with this recognition that while updating my website is a priority, so is taking the time to think about it and doing it right. I don’t want to regurgitate my current site and simply rebuild it in a new program. It’s time to reinvent the wheel of experience that I’ve built over the years. But with so much emphasis on usability, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc, it’s daunting to think that this website isn’t just words and images on the page. It’s something that needs to be thought out/through.
So thinking things through I shall, including what portfolio samples best represent me and my experience. Small steps will ensue until I take that giant leap to publish a new site. Stay tuned….