This site is under construction!
I’ve seen far too many projects take too long to launch, because they were aiming for perfection on launch day.
I’m avoiding that trap, by building in public!
It’s an easy mistake to make, no-one want to put a project live when it’s not quite finished, but aiming for perfection can mean that launch day never comes, and that’s why this version of my site is probably always going to be “under construction”!
This is the 5th iteration of my website, and one that is long overdue given that I’ve not touched it in almost a decade, so I knew from the outset that it would likely be a big job. However, as I was keen to make a change I decided I wasn’t going to wait until it was “perfect”, instead I decided to make it live once it was “good enough”.
How good is ‘good enough’?
In my case this was pretty simple to determine. I took the existing content from my website, which was straightforward given that it was built with Jekyll, almost everything was stored as plain text, in Markdown files.
As this version of my site was built with Craft CMS, all that I had to do was to create the page types and channels to store the various content types and dump my existing content into those channels.
Good enough to get started!
Now, with the content from my old site in place, and the ability to add new features and functionality as required I was already in a better place than before, so I put the site live. All I have to do now is add new content, and add any new features that I think are needed.
The momentum of motivation
Clearly, putting something live that you are not 100% confident in, and does not quite fulfill the requirements, is ‘sub-optimal’ but it is a hell of a motivator and provides the impetus to continue pushing forward the design and development.
It’s far easier to incrementally improve things, one by one, than it is to make everything perfect. It also makes it much easier to prioritise my development time, there’s the broken things that I must fix today, the things I’d like to get in place this week, and the stuff that I’d like to get round to eventually. Priorities!
