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So, minor freak-out today when I saw that The New Minimum had been posted on siteInspire (of course it was right as a client project’s launch was hitting TechCrunch and Engadget). I generally prefer to stay behind the scenes so this was a good learning experience in having your work in the public eye (or in front of a firing squad depending on your perspective).
Never develop live, never publish things you don’t love
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TNM doesn’t get tons of visitors and I usually work on it late at night. Thus, I build right on the live site. I learned that this is a huge mistake as pageviews started ticking up and there were tons of things that were still not working quite right from the work I was doing last week. Learn Git, develop locally, hold-off on new features — whatever.
Also, I’ve recently been of the mind that launching and improving is far better than delaying or not launching at all. Well, today I learned to never go live with something you don’t absolutely love because you’ll “fix it later” or because time necessitates it. I learned this the hard way, as the worst the site has ever looked is how it was captured on siteInspire and saved for posterity. I sure as hell came home and made some of those fixes.
Comments still suck
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Hater’s gonna hate — what can you do? I take design criticism all day so I thought I could handle it, but something about online comments are especially slimy. Dealing with the trolls is just part of the game (you know who you are).
That said, if it’s in ALL CAPS you can probably safely ignore it.
Coincidentally, I had the following conversation with the proprietor of siteInspire about a month ago (we don’t know eachother otherwise and I didn’t solicit him to feature my site):
Design for yourself sometimes
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Every day I design things with tons of limitations — some good, some completely arbitrary, some bad — imposed on me by clients, users, colleagues, convention, etc. Sometimes you need to design things for yourself to stay happy, to stay motivated, to exercise the creative muscle. If you can’t do that on your own blog, where can you? So just let it rip.
Yeah, the site is wide and tall but I really don’t think scrolling is hard or new.
Know your limits
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I’m not a developer. I don’t get paid to work on TNM. I don’t have the coding chops to build things 100% the way I want. I don’t have time to write and design things exactly how I’d like. Since nobody else is going to cut you any slack, cut yourself some.
Take compliments graciously
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I admire the sites on siteInspire and the curator’s discerning eye. I visit daily and it’s an absolute honor to be featured among such talented folks. It’s also been a good learning experience. So, thank you siteInspire!