As 2021 comes to a close, I once again feel the annual pull of my undernourished little blog. I truly wish I had more time to sit down and write, but alas, it doesn’t seem to exist in my daily routine. It's usually during the holidays, like now, when client activity winds down and I’m able to set aside a couple hours to prattle on about my feelings.
So, what a year, eh? Holy shite.
Obviously, all you have to do is mention The Pandemic, and immediately everyone gets you. I'll say the year sucked, but on the other hand I’m thankful none of my closest family members have gotten any variant of Covid ever — knock on wood. But I did hear stories from neighbors and acquaintances whose friends or family had contracted the coronavirus, and in some cases people died. I guess it doesn’t seem real until it hits that close to home. It's really a tragic way for one's life to end.
If that weren’t enough, many more issues weighed heavily on my psyche during the year — health issues my wife had (in addition to chronic Lyme disease, she suffers from IBS, which landed her in the ER twice in one weekend, then a third time at a hospital ER, whereupon she was admitted and treated); one of our dogs had knee surgery and required 3 months of rehab and recovery care; my mother-in-law has been inhabiting a world of dementia for quite a while now and needed family to fill in while her home health aides disappeared; I began was working on a book project with my mother (which is still ongoing); I was caregiving for my wife while doing all the domestic duties at home; I'm on the Board of Directors of my condo complex and we faced some daunting infrastructure expenses and budgeting; and there's that nagging little voice that says "find more work, ok?" every day; and so on. And what else? There are probably more issues I can't even think of right now. That’s enough though, right?
Professionally, 2021 was similar to 2020 — try to get more freelance work while a pandemic rages.
And yet, if I was going to find new clients and get new design and writing projects, I felt my portfolio site might be hurting me more than helping. It did get me a few new client projects this year, so it seemed “good enough.” But it still bothered me. I had a ton of work over the past several years that hadn't made it’s way to my site. And the work I did have on my site was not presented well.
After 7 years of having basically the same UI theme on Squarespace I was beginning to think, well, maybe this is that year I do another overhaul. But the thought of doing a gut renovation of my site just made me want to lie down and sleep, and hope that when I woke up, by some miracle someone had done all the work.
It turned out to be a fairly decent year work-wise so being busier than I was in 2020 helped me put off the portfolio site revamp. New projects also meant new work samples that I could show. This meant at some point soon I was going to have to rip off the band aid and start into my site overhaul. So I set a goal: get it done by the end of the year.
The summer passed quickly and I picked up two new clients that kept me very busy in the 3rd quarter, and would stretch into the 4th quarter too. By October, the site redesign was still hanging over my head. I really didn't have extra time in the day to set aside for a monster effort of this size. It just made me groan. I was going to have to go back and rebuild a lot of work samples that I'd had on my site for several years. They were blurry and low-res and needed to be bigger and high-res. (More groans mixed with muttered profanity.) I could see the way forward clearly: it represented hours and hours of grunt work. Lots of image processing, importing, exporting, uploading, yada yada yada. Blech. But if I didn't do it nobody would.
I decided I'd have to use mornings as my site makeover time. Get up a little earlier, get some coffee in me, and "sac up" as they say.
So, it began in mid-October.
I did a deep dive into my Squarespace theme and found new settings and site preferences that actually got me excited, and I was beginning to find my enthusiasm for the process. I found fonts that I'd already been using as part of my professional branding, I selected some fresh new colors, and I found better ways to organize my content and streamline the UI. I took advantage of some free tech-y looking video clips from Adobe and added a short video to my home page to jazz it up and set a “digital landscape” tone that I ended up liking a lot.
I also had to start the curation process—of deleting old and irrelevant work samples, bringing in fresh new work, rethinking how the work would be displayed, and developing a workflow that would become my own "best practice" for converting native files into engaging layouts on my site. And, spend some time on content organization.
In addition to that, I had to extend my rebranding to social platforms, my email signature, on promotional pieces, and on my résumé. Like I said, it was a monster project. But I managed to build momentum and I stayed in the groove for over two months. That’s what you call a “long tail.”
I'm really happy to say I met my goal of getting it done by end-of-year and I even beat my own deadline by a couple weeks. I'm actually proud of my portfolio now and I feel it shows off my best client work. More importantly, I can build upon what I have going forward.
And just under the wire, I’ve added this blog section, which includes all my posts from Blogger, going back to 2009. There really aren’t that many, so don’t freak out if feel you really want to read all of them. If you do, well, have at it.
Anyway, share some comments and feedback if you'd like.
As always, thanks for reading.
Happy holidays and happy new year! Cheers.