How to motivate yourself to update websites
1 Mar 2007
I’ve finally gotten round to updating my website, and adding a few of the projects I’ve been working on in the past year.
When I started this business a year ago I put up a thumbnail and a one-line summary for a few sample projects – which I picked primarily on the basis that they had interesting homepages and would make pretty thumbnails. And since then I’ve done very little. The blog gets updated intermittently, the website and list of projects not at all. Well, I’ve been busy, and I get people by referral or word of mouth rather than via the website, so updating content somehow never quite made it to the top of the To-Do list.
But today I’ve made myself a deadline. I’ve written a proposal which our potential client will receive tomorrow. In it there is a line saying “see website for details of previous projects”. So by tomorrow there must be details of some previous projects up on this website. That’s a deadline.
But I’m finding it tough going.
Each page must have a screenshot or two to make it look pretty, and because one picture is worth one thousand words and I really don’t want to write a thousand words, and if I did no one would read them.
Selecting, taking and editing the screenshots takes time. I’ve spent even more time setting up a nice little slide show so people could cycle through’ the multiple screenshots but decided that this didn’t work unless all the images were high-quality and precisely aligned. Nice for photos, slightly less impressive for pictures of blurry text.
The text must be clear and meaningful, and avoid the temptations of evil management speak (e.g. “holistic interactive enterprise internet communication solution”)
It has to summarise the project. Sometimes easy to do (website to advertise business), sometimes rather more difficult (we want a nuggetorium)
It has to explain what I did in a way which is both impressive and convincing (and also true).
And I’m really not enjoying myself