2001 called. It said "hey, nice website."

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 12/23/09)

It's astonishing how quickly time can fly by and through it all you keep saying yeah I'll update that site next week or month or year. I've never been a procrastinator when it comes to self-promotion. But revamping my own website just seemed like a time suck that I couldn't afford at any point in the past 10 years.

Then again, having an outdated website is something I can't afford either. It makes me look like a soon-to-be extinct species of Tech Man. One that prospective interviewers (if there are any in my future) would inhale and say "Oooooh, wow. Yeah. 2001 called and said hey, nice website."

And this leaves me with few options. I can't just keep reposting new content to an archaic site architecture. There are too many examples of that already. (Craigslist.) What good is a portfolio, whose leather exterior turns people off? I have to move forward and embrace the new. It's certainly not a foreign concept to designers and programmers. Something new is always coming. And we adopt The New Thing fairly readily.

For me, the procrastination has been the result of some very real and substantive changes in career direction. Right around the time the current/outdated iteration of anthonywhetzel.com was built and launched online, I started a company with a copywriter/business partner. We started our company in June of 2000, probably one of the worst years you could do so, aside from say 2008. And this start-up required a lot of time, effort and development. In New York City, there's virtually no end to the demands: taxes, accountants, lawyers, office space, bookkeeping, rent, software and hardware purchases, office networks, routers, switches, high-speed internet providers, heat in the winter (as well as "we have no heat" calls to the super), telephone and cable service outages, quarterly estimated taxes, partnership filing vs. C-corp, new business development, sales, creative fees and rate cards, and on and on. And it's still happening now.

O2 Agency, as the company was named, still functions today, guided by the two of us and a freelancer, and almost 10 years later we're still a company clients will call. But the fallout of all this has been the abject poverty of my own personal portfolio website.

So with a persistent and gentle nudging from my wife, whose best friend's husband, Steve Hartzog, is a web tech guru and teacher, I decided to embark upon the process of upgrading my site again. I've begun the foundation work already: starting with a new re-branding of my name and identity (creative director/designer) with a new logo, fresh new fonts and soon, the roughing out of a new GUI, to which Steve will apply all sorts of cool code.

Needless to say, a lot has happened since I coded my own site using html framesets! Something else happened since the last time I built my website: smartphones.

Now I'm challenged with building a site that could be easily read by any of the recent crop of Web-enabled mobile phones. And since the iPhone and other models don't have a Flash plug-in for mobile browsing yet, the technology employed for the website will likely avoid Flash. Which is fine — there's an amazing array of slick Javascript tools that can make for a rich online experience. This will be fun. I hope. And demanding. But absolutely necessary.

I'm excited and full of new ideas. The holidays will probably derail my progress initially, but hopefully in the next couple months I'll have a site that I can once again be proud of.

Fingers crossed.