A shade over two years ago, someone’s personal website had a very high profile redesign. Well, high profile among a certain kind of Very Online web design crowd, anyway. And that gang were falling over themselves to praise it. A “lovingly hand-carved redesign”, one person called it. “New, gorgeous, funky-fresh”, said another. It caused a stir for good reason: it really was was an interesting, bold piece of work. In a world where so many have abandoned their own little place on the web, it really did stand out a mile.
A year ago, it stopped updating. The person who designed it is still around, and still regularly posts on Twitter. But their site – launched in a blaze of glory – is essentially dead.
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No, I’m not going to name the person, or their website. The specific example isn’t important. Let’s talk about me instead.
Earlier this year, I launched the current design of Dirty Feed. Throughout the design process, I had plenty of ideas which I considered, and then rejected. Many of these involved grids of pictures, much like the current design of Anil Dash’s site. Other ideas involved splitting my writing into two types: longer “Articles”, and shorter “Notes”, much like the old Noise to Signal that I designed over a decade ago. The idea being: give more prominence to the really big pieces on here, without them being shoved aside too easily by the smaller blog posts.
In the end, I abandoned both ideas, for very similar reasons. In terms of just going with one huge picture grid for the front page, I just don’t think they really work when you have shorter posts too. A clickthrough picture for a tiny blog post feels over-egged and wrong, selling it as something bigger and more important than it actually is.
As for splitting my writing into two types, that superficially feels like a much better idea. But then I thought a little more about how I write. Something like this is clearly a long article, and something like this is clearly a short blog post. But what about this piece, which sits in a weird hinterland between the two: too short to be a full article, but too long for a tiny blog post?
In the end, I abandoned both ideas entirely, in favour of a more traditional front page layout. Maybe it’s not stunningly exciting, but I’m not forced to either shrink my writing to fit a blog post, or expand it to be a proper article. Each piece of writing can be exactly the length it needs to be, without forcing it into a shape that it doesn’t fit.
My point is obvious. That when designing your personal site, don’t design for how you wish you wrote. Design for how you actually write. A good design isn’t there for people to coo over for being bold and original; a good design helps you write and publish.1 And a bad design is one which gets in the way, and makes sharing your ideas difficult.
And why does this matter? Let’s go back to the “hand-carved redesign” which opened this piece. The overall reaction from the Very Online web designer crowd was: “How great that people are moving away from social networks and back to their own place on the web. It’s important to have ownership of your own work.” Which I 100% agree with.
But unless you keep your site updated with your thoughts and ideas, having your own place on the web doesn’t really mean that much. It doesn’t have to be updated every day, every week, or even every month, especially. But I don’t think it’s unfair to say that a site lying stagnant for a year isn’t going to be fresh and exciting, no matter how funky your design is.
If you do that, no wonder people will just stick to Twitter to keep up with what you’re doing.
Or upload images and publish, or link to podcasts and publish. Whatever it is that you make. ↩