nerdspice

Cut Yourself Some Slack on Design

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I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a while now. Not knowing what to write about has never been the real blocker. The design of the site is what has been holding me back. Today, I’ve decided that will no longer be the case. If you’re a developer like me who struggles with design, tune in, this is for us.

I created my first real post several months back and I was so focused on making the site look good, I rushed and created a mess of my layouts. It looked ok but it was not maintainable. I kept thinking of how it would be painful to refine the site as it grew. I didn’t take the time to read up on how Hugo really works.

I tried to resolve this by changing over to a polished, pre-built theme but, I was still not happy with this design. I initially thought if I had something that looks better, I’d be happy but I found that I just felt like I was cheating.

That’s when I realized I’m a software developer, not a designer. Not having strong design skills has held me back on a lot of projects that I have wanted to do over the years. My desire to blog has never went away and today, I’ve decided to take control of the situation. I started over, once again – but with a plan that prioritizes content creation and momentum over polish.

A readable and funtional site is all that is needed to get started. I can refine and improve the design over time. I’m going to cut myself some well-deserved slack for not being a designer. Now, I plan to focus on content and work on one (very) small piece of the design each week, and only after researching a sustainable way to approach what I want to do.

This means accepting a few tradeoffs:

  • Do I have a 100% mobile friendly design right now? No.
  • Do I have a mobile navigation menu right now? Also no.
  • Is it perfect in its current state? Absolutely not.
  • Is my site readable and otherwise functional? Yes.

If you’ve been holding off on starting something because it isn’t polished, don’t wait, join me! I don’t even have readers yet and there’s no audience to impress 😂. Just go for it, that’s what I’m doing here.