Putting my money where my mouth is

As someone who is quite familiar with the web but until recently was completely unfamiliar with frontend development (or development of any sort), taking on the seemingly simple challenge of building a website has seemed like a lofty goal for quite a while.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been designing websites for years now – I’ve even been charging for it a good portion of the time. I’ve gotten to a point in my web design career where I can be proud of what I’ve accomplished and confident in my ability to do good work. This isn’t to say that I’m immune to the fits of self doubt and self deprecation that are common amongst all creatives—I am a master of self deprecation—but overall I’m happy with my evolution as a designer up to this point.

One thing that I’ve never been happy with, however, is the fact that I haven’t been able to make my work functional. I’ve believed for a long time that in order to be a truly successful web designer, one has to understand and be involved in all aspects of the process. Despite that, I’ve never coded a single one of the websites I’ve designed – until this one.

Here on Nekai I’ve gotten as close to a pixel-perfect representation of my mockups as possible – and as simple a site as it is, it was a massive pain in the ass. It’s taken months of learning the ins and outs of markup (in my free time, inbetween the real, paying projects that put food on my table) and then more months of figuring out how to wrangle wordpress into doing what I wanted it to do; Now having gone through this process, I have a newfound respect for those people who do it every day for a living.

if this sounds self-congratulatory, I apologize – because it isn’t intended to be. Truth be told, it’s hard to say you’re a newbie at anything, and I think that it holds a lot of people back from trying new things – myself very much included. It’s a lot easier to say “I don’t do that” than it is to say “I’m not good at that, but I want to be.” Everyone (again, myself included) wants to project a scholarly image of themselves on their blogs, and starting this one off by talking about something I’m not particularly skilled at may seem counterproductive in that respect; I hope to make it up in later posts.

For now, I can’t say I don’t code websites anymore – I can just say that I’m not very good, but I want to be.