The Seven Year Itch

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Our new website is finally online. And I wish I could stress that “finally” in the same way as the thought of the pending website has haunted me for the last 12 months at least.

I am a web designer and I have been creating websites for people for nearly 10 years, but for some reason I couldn’t sign off even a single detail of our sparkly new site. I did the planning, the content gathering, the sketching, the mocking up, but something was always unsatisfactory to me and had to scrap, re-think, re-plan, re-arrange, re-design over and over again.

What was wrong with me?

The official line was that I could really only work on our website after I’d spent the most productive part of the day pouring my genius on clients’ projects and was therefore drained of any creativity (and probably  brain activity too).

A couple of weeks ago, we decided it was time to link our website to our latest project Leonecasa.it, but horror…. and our new site was nowhere near finished and our current website was an old and stale, 600×800 res. fella that hadn’t had a makeover for the last 7 years.

So the decision was taken to put up a temporary simple page, where we could present our most recent work and then develop it and evolve it, when we had time.

Now that the new site – ehm…the new (single) page – is up, I feel a lot better and it seems that I am finally coming to terms with what was holding the whole project back. I hereby pronounce as the culprit,  a vicious mixture of:

1. irresistible desire to show off

2. unnecessary quest for innovation

3. tendency to be overly critical (aka trying to remove any source of possible criticism)

Thinking about it now, it appears obvious that what we needed wasn’t anything fancy, just a simple straightforward showcase of our work, which is already in its own right the best proof of our abilities and creativity that you can get.

So, for the time being, our original, ambitious design that aimed to make the best of our CSS, AJAX and Flash skills to create an all-singing, all-dancing showcase, is resting in my virtual draw.

The idea of adding to and improving the existing pages to create something alive and evolving, is instead gaining momentum.

Silvia

Tags:

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 Web Design