Blog Improvement - Do It Wrong Quickly
Do It Wrong Quickly? That’s what Mike Moran suggests when you don’t get things right the first time. That’s generally not my style, but when it comes to design, I always do it as quickly as possible. I understand that many web designers and especially new designers who release WordPress Themes for free or inexpensively, often spend weeks on their designs, developing wireframes, creating graphics, tweaking pixels and tiny icons, etc., but historically, when I’ve designed, I have become frustrated when I cannot design something I am comfortable with in one day’s time. See my rant on my web design frustrations from January 2006.
But in the case of this blog, I was recently tagged as part of a blog improvement meme. Since then, I have been thinking about making some necessary enhancements. This morning, I began modifying an already heavily modified WordPress Theme. As I made changes to link colors, I found that I didn’t like the way the theme was coded, and I was making things worse, and I was doing my modifications live. So as the site broke down more and more as I modified the code, I reverted back to the default WordPress theme. I ate some food, watched some football, and began creating my theme OFFLINE with the comfort of the working default theme. I returned when I thought all was well, but when I went to upload everything, I somehow missed an extra “div.” Adding an element can cause all sorts of problems with layout, and it definitely did. I worked as quickly as possible, making modifications to figure out what was wrong with my design, and going through my code line by line to make sure all tags that had been opened were also closed. I definitely did this whole design thing wrong, and quickly, because less than a day later, the design is ready, and I’ve added a minimum of content to at least temporarily satisfy myself that I have improved my blog the way I said I needed to.
I challenge you to just sit down and fiddle with things until you do it right. I did it in a day, 12 hours exactly, and I’m sure it could’ve been done a whole lot faster.
