A newly refreshed Idealien Studios landing page full of featured content goodness.

In one of my most recent updates, I noted that “…it has been almost 4 months since I made an update to this blog.” A large part of that was being overwhelmed with work and significant amounts of wonderful chaotic change happening in my life during that time period. During the limited free time I did have available, it was a struggle to want to do more of the same in designing / developing my own website.

This lead to the formation of a very bad logic loop that I let myself get trapped into. As best I can describe it, I felt that:

• I did not have large blocks of time to work on the design of my website.
• I was not satisfied with how the website looked.
• I did not want to write content for a site that did not look fantastic.
• I had other things that I could be doing instead of writing / coding.
• The freelance career isn’t going where I wanted it, so why bother?

The unfortunate part of this vicious cycle is that it was all manufactured by me – the site, the content and the perception that the obstacles were insurmountable. I had been what I can only call serially redeveloping the theme for this site for the better part of 4 months and it was beginning to take it’s toll on my psyche.

I *could* limp to the finish line with my current theme design – but as a learning experience I think I’ll start from scratch on a framework.Idealien Twitter from May 29th

So last weekend I decided to leverage what I could from my existing efforts (css, images, javascript) and start fresh building on top of a strong theme framework base – Thematic. I also did so with a new approach to the design, development and writing for the site:

• It is unrealistic to expect to produce a perfect site in one shot.
• Understand that none of the challenges I face are insurmountable.
• Just keep swimming!
• How can I make positive improvements to the site in 15 – 30 minute blocks?
• Use draft status for posts until they’re ready- it’s why it exists.
• Incremental development is far better than no development at all.

While there are some things about Thematic  that I don’t care for, particularily it’s approach to sidebars, it does a lot of things very well. The results have been positive progress on my site almost each day this past week and increased confidence that I can make things happen bit by bit. I’m planning some smaller posts that cover the plugins / process I used to achieve the different functional elements of the site. Those posts will actually be driving me to add more functionality (code highlighting, lightbox galleries, recommended readings via google reader and more). After all, if my freelance career isn’t going where I want it to, I only have myself to blame. I’ll save the description of my new direction for Idealien Studios for another post.

Much like teaching your children, I am falling back on the “Do as I say, not as I do” concept. I would obviously not recommend / use this approach to development for a client-site where the occasional breaking of things in order to fix them or display of debug comments in a production environment would be an aggregious error. But for my own process / projects, I have come to the conclusion that I will never try to build a perfect website again.