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What the cuss is taking so long?

By Dawn Sailors In Blog News

It occurred to me this past weekend that, while started with the best of intentions, this blog has quickly fallen into the same fate as so many childhood journals of mine. That is to say, I haven’t been keeping it up very well lately. SO… while I fully intend to get back into the swing of blogging much more regularly, I thought I should take some time to explain first what’s been taking my focus away from this particular project.

It seems like there are a million excuses piling up in my head right now, but I’ll start with the most prominent one. The one that is kicking me in the stomach as I type. Yep, that’s right. Mr. S and I discovered a few months ago that we are in fact expecting an unexpected addition to our little family. Our first child (a daughter!) is due on March 1. For those of you counting, that is exactly 10 months after our wedding day. So needless to say, between morning sickness and fatigue, financial fine-tuning (lets just say the honeymoon budget has been re-purposed for now) and all the other little stresses of finding out you’re expecting, my dedication to blogging has been put on the back burner. But more about the little girly later. (I SWEAR!)

Besides that the main reason for the lack of posts lately is that I’ve been in a bit of a design transition. It is a combination of several factors, but I’ll try to explain it as best I can. It started with a nagging uncertainty about the blog design. I learned a long time ago, that designing for yourself is one-million times more difficult than designing for any client. I can look at a client’s website and tell them precisely what they need, what makes sense, where to go- and then I do it for them. But when it comes to your own site, it is never that simple. For starters, you first have to figure out exactly what I always try to get out of clients when we meet: who are you? what are you trying to say? how do you want to be perceived? It’s a hard question to answer. Especially for a personal site or blog like this one and doubly especially when you have an unrelenting if unreasonable sense that people will be judging you based on it. I mean, this is what I DO, so my own site should be the best site ever right?? Wrong.

Which brings me to the second part of this long-winded second excuse. I’m a designer, but I want to be more. That is to say, that although I’ve been an interactive designer for over 3 years now, my working knowledge of programming has been pretty limited. A fact which I have recently decided needs to be remedied. Its not that I couldn’t go on like this forever, just passing along my design files for someone else to “make work”. I could easily do that. But I don’t want to. I want to have a new goal and learn new things. And so that’s where the blog has been at. Stuck in limbo while I’ve been working at a redesign while teaching myself the skills to program this new design all by myself.

There is good news though. Besides not working on the actual blog, I have been working on lots of other things, including lists and lists of things in my “I need to blog about that” category (Nursery!!). So my plan is to start doing that now. So here’s to getting back on the bike, er.. blog. It might still be a while before the new design changes start showing up, or it might be a learn-as-I-go experimental process over the next several months, but I plan to keep blogging in the meantime. For real this time.