Being There

When thinking about creating a personal site, I mulled over the different approaches that I’ve been reading about in various other blog posts on the subject of organizing and presenting the social data that we all seem to have scattered around the web these days. Atomic Playboy brought up several different approaches, including Jon Tan’s impressive site, dooce’s more traditional blog layout, and Zeldman’s lovely design. I found Jody Ferry’s site via Zeldman, and decided to use that as my inspiration partly because I like the simplicity and partly because I figured I could actually pull it off even with my weak html/css/etc knowledge.

So here is the front page. It’s basically a splash, with links to content on other sites (blog being the exception). I’m not sure if I will leave my Tumblr link there or just keep it to the RSS feed on the side of this blog. I may add one line of Twitter under my name. And I’m thinking I might scratch the “professional” information all together. It’s still a work in progress, obviously. But I like the way that a visitor is greeted with something simply and pretty, and can choose where to go from there. It’s definitely an “outsourced” personal site. I don’t mind, though, because I don’t intend for this blog to really be something that I work at to make popular. A personal project, that’s what I keep calling it in my head.

It’s always been sort of exciting for me to put a site together, even if it’s cobbled from parts I found elsewhere, because it ultimately ends with sending the link to someone else, asking them what they think, and savoring the anticipation of the good or bad review. It’s fun to hear design feedback, especially after I’ve spent hours staring at the same thing, so much that I convince myself it’s totally awesome. Of course, there’s always room for constant improvement. But that’s the fun of it! Building websites is a great distraction.