Act First. Clean Up Later

I have wanted to start a blog for a longtime. At first I tried micro-blogging with Twitter to see if I had the discipline to add content on a regular basis, without the pressure of styling the output. The natural progression from this seemed to be Tumblr, but I convinced myself that Wordpress would be less restrictive and I could implement a simple layout relatively quickly.

Man, how wrong could I be?

Act first

I have attempted for the last six months to put together a simple blog very little furniture, that would allow me to use any imagery I wanted in a post and wouldn’t date as a design. What I hadn’t bargained for was that the snatched hour here and there that I found to work on the site did allow me to make progress, but if there was a gap of more than a fortnight then I would be bored with the layout when I returned.

I ended up stripping out more and more functionality in order to give me less to tinker with, which did eventually let me complete the build. Having built the site in Camino and Firefox, I then did a quick around the grounds on some PC browsers to see how the layout fared through the Microsoft window.

I ended up stripping out more and more functionality in order to give me less to tinker with, which did eventually let me complete the build.

Luckily the design (mainly due to a lack of frills) holds its ground across all the browsers I checked in, bar a few little quibbles which, being the client for a change, I have the luxury of ignoring if I wish. So, as not to impede the addition of some content, which after all was the raison d’être this project, I have overlooked those issuettes for now.

Clean up later

So, my vision for this website. It will inevitably evolve over time both in terms of layout and content, but for now it is to be a more permanent and more visible home than my moleskine, for the thoughts and ideas I have about design and the web industry.

The other reason is because I wish to become a better writer and to become better known to my peers. I have been in the web industry for a decade now, and in my current role I plan and oversee the design and build process rather than be part of it. I see things from up here that I just wouldn’t have seen from the ground and I want to see what others think of my opinions.

So feel free to leave your own comments and thoughts as I may at times be controversial in my prose, but all with the intention of leading the industry in new directions.