You read that headline correctly. What you’re looking at right now is the final
redesign for my blog. Nothing could be better than this.
Okay, you got me. I know that there are better designs out there. Freezing my
blog’s design has nothing to do with how it looks and has everything to do with
time management.
When I first starting building websites, I built a site from scratch. As I
learned more about what I was doing, I would redesign that site regularly. Too
regularly as the cycle repeated every few months.
Even with this particular blog, I’ve put efforts into doing a redesign / round
of improvements every year. In 2015, I ended up missing the mark on my personal
deadline and ended up leaving the site half finished for all of 2016.
This final redesign finished what I had started in 2015, with an eye towards
simplicity. The last round of updates weren’t bad, but they did lack things
like navigation, which is kind of important.
In case you missed it, I did discuss why my site didn’t have an
navigation mid-last year.
So here we are, the site is “done” and far from perfect. Since my blog doesn’t
serve as a portfolio for my design skills, it matters naught. What does matter
is that I have on less thing to worry about.
Redesigning a blog doesn’t improve the quality or frequency of my blog posts. By
being satisfied with the site as-is, I free up both mental cycles and time that
I can re-invest into more and better content.
Will the site eventually look dated? Probably. Hell, I’d argue that it looks
pretty dated now. I mean, I am using generic font families instead of Helvetica
or some sluggish Google Web Fonts.
The thing is, if you go around looking at some of the more successful [non-tech]
blogs, you’ll notice they haven’t changed in years. Some haven’t changed in over
a decade!
What sets those sites apart from most blogs is that they are continually
churning out content. The snazziest blog with a ton of slick animations and
modern CSS and all that shit is pretty worthless if it doesn’t have fresh
content that’s updated regularly.
So that’s it. This is the joshtronic.com for the foreseeable future. Bugs will
be fixed as they arise, maybe some new header images, but that’s about it.
Oh and in case you hit this blog post looking for design inspiration, you could
always save yourself some time by hitting up TemplateMonster. Could also
do what my boy Justin did and find something online for free.
