Done > Good
- amyjean2003
- Jul 8, 2016
- 3 min read
If you are here, you’re already witness in my next big learning endeavor: website design. After inspiration (as well as a bit of prodding) from multiple discussions with friends and several self-development books later, I realized after years of on-again, off-again personal blogging and several years of thinking about a website presence, it was time to go all in and see what might happen. So welcome!
Constantly Curious is dedicated to exploring new ideas, new places, new hobbies, new techniques, new languages, new subjects, basically all things learning. Some things will be learned accidentally (like when I found a bug in my breakfast) and some things will be pursued actively (like building a website). Some things might be learned in a short time frame, others will develop over the course of weeks, months, or even years. Some will focus on the outward learning of experience and expanding knowledge, other things will focus on internal growth. I welcome any thoughts and feedback, or suggestions on what next to learn.
Here is what I’ve learned so far when it comes to building a website:
Nothing is perfect. There is not one perfect place for creating and hosting a website. Just as in life, there are so many options, and eventually we just have to pick whichever one feels most right at the time and run with it. Also: nothing is permanent. If something doesn’t work out, change.
Be careful what buttons you push. I am a huge fan of shortcut keys but sometimes my fingers get ahead of where I think the cursor is. Hitting backspace too quickly can cause dire effects like entire pages to disappear. Perhaps needless to say, that happened a couple times, and the website builders that hadn't automatically saved my work for me got cut from the running. Plus, be careful WHOSE buttons you push while exploring new things!
Take frustrations in stride. I tend to have a particular idea in my head of what “it” is supposed to look like (change “it” to pretty much anything). When I cannot get “it” to be the way I imagine, I get frustrated. Instead of letting that bog me down while I was learning how to assemble boxes and banners, I began to look at other options to create a similar effect and create something as close as I could imagine. Basically, “let it go” (cue soundtrack).
Done is better than good. I took a page from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic: done is better than good. At the end of the week I’d spent over 12 hours working on this website researching options, trying out different hosts, exploring domain ideas, playing with templates and colors and fonts and gadgets and plugins and-and-and. Finally, I realized I simply needed to be done. While it wasn’t completely what I had in mind it was at a point it was shareable. (But if anyone knows how to create strike-through text within a block of writing, not in an html box, please let me know!)
Celebrate and share what you’ve done! We get so caught up in the day to day we sometimes forget how important little moments of success are. Celebrate your achievements, no matter how small, and share them. Share your website, your blog, your artwork, your poem, your tricky math problem you finally conquered, whatever it may be. The number of social media tools makes this easy, but remember to share with your family, your neighbors, your friends in a personal way as well. And when you see someone sharing something, remember they’re taking a risk. Like it! Appreciate that they took a moment to put themselves out there. In this world of internet trolls and negative profiling it takes a huge amount of courage for most people to share honest work and success. Let people know you see it and appreciate it.
I still have a lot to learn about building websites (and I haven’t even touched the marketing side of this adventure) but the idea of sharing whatever I might learn with people near and around the world excites me. The world needs people who are excited about what they do. What excites you?
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