I've been working for about a month now trying to put together a semi-coherent website for my business as a freelance software developer, architect and all-around guru. For someone of my particular disposition, this is no mean feat. I'm not really a designer, but in that time I've come up with a number of passable but not awe-inspiring concepts in a variety of color schemes. I've learned a good deal more than I knew before about CSS, web standards, design and layout, color theory, and so on; but I wouldn't say that any of this knowledge or experience
has turned any of various piles of files sitting on my hard disk into the Mona Lisa.
But as tough as working on the design has been, writing the copy for the site has been ten times harder. How much content do I really need? What are the five things that absolutely must be said pertaining to X? What kind of tone should I use? Professional and knowledgeable? Conversational and clever? Do I really know the reader well enough at this point to engage them in witty banter? Will that come across as presumptuous? Dear God, will anybody love me?!
As these things often do, it took some trial and error (and ultimately a dose of desperation) before I was able to see the simple truth that had been before me all along: that I don't need a website. Or rather, I don't need one in the sense that I'd been thinking about all this time, at least not today. Because today what am I? I'm a guy who's getting out of corporate IT in the hope that I'll be able to do more satisfying work, provide better services for customers and the community at large without all the red tape, work on some of my own ideas, have more freedom as to how I do my job and organize my day, earn more money, spend more time with my family and friends, and generally feel that my life is more integrated than it is today. Beating my brains in trying to find just the right collection of buzzwords and stock photos to tell people that I deliver superior value by providing services that are agile and cost-effective and blah blah blah only begins to sound like some nonsensical departmental strategy document and subverts my stated goals before I ever really get started. What's the use in proclaiming the benefits of simplicity if you don't follow those principles yourself? In the end, what I'm really looking for is a platform that allows me to talk to people - people I already know, people I don't know but with whom I share common interests - about the things that are going on in my business, technology, and my life. That sounds like a blog to me.
A blog does everything I need in this situation. A blog, whether by it's very nature or through the lens of what blog culture has become, usually represents the thoughts and opinions of one person or party. A blog is ideal for showing a progression of thought over time, a feature that closely mirrors the sort of progressive learning experience I'm expecting in making this change. The style of writing used by most blogs tends to be more conversational and less formal; it reads like it was written for people rather than consumers. Blogs encourage the reader to participate in a conversation, but even passive readers get something out of it. A lot of blogging software has tons of helpful features baked right in: tagging, syndication, trackbacks, and so on.
In large part, this has been a question of self-realization and self-clarification on my part with respect to my relationship with this business, and I feel like I've finally resolved it. Things may change in the future, and I may decide to adopt some corporate identity, staff up, and so on. For right now though, simplicity suits me, and a solution that gives me a platform to speak and expound and think out loud seems like just what's needed.