Perfection is Such an Ugly Word

There are situations where I can be, when it comes to my own work, a bit of a perfectionist. Now, this may not be perfection in the sense of 'everybody likes it.' It's more like a 'beauty in the eye of the beholder' type of deal. And I rarely, if ever, nail it on the first try.
So where am I going with this?
Earlier this week I mentioned that the Steam Vent was going to be redesigned. I was not lying about that. I estimated it at about a week, more or less, and now here I am 6 days later and I can't get the damn thing to look right. I have ideas for the site. Lots of ideas. Ideas are not hard to come by. However, it's the ideas that work which prove to be more elusive. And, being that self-proclaimed perfectionist, I won't implement a concept until I know it will look good (of course, the irony here being that, when it's all said and done, I'll still have visitors to the site that say, "You know what, I really liked the old design better."). This is what makes life frustrating.

Many of you are probably asking yourselves what's wrong with the current design. Well, it won't do any good asking yourself that, since you're there and I'm here. You're better off just leaving a comment or emailing me....
OK, sorry to go all Naked Gun on you there, so I'll just answer that question now: the site design wasn't very original. I used a (gasp!) pre-formatted template with which Blogger was so kind as to provide me. It was, to me, suitable for the time being, but being a computer nerd, using other people's designs just didn't sit well. My inner geek was screaming. I had to do it for myself. Plus, now that I surf so many other blogs (with Blog Explosion), I realized just how many other people have the exact same template as I have. Again, it didn't sit well. And thus my quest began.

The part that makes designing this site particularly difficult is that it's more of a personal reflection than any of the other sites I've designed through the years. For a couple years I worked as a private contractor in web design, but in most of those cases they already had an idea. I made it work. Now, the only one I have to impress is myself, and the waters are choppier than I had expected. Or maybe I just forgot.

Now that you're all caught up with what goes through the mind of an obsessive computer programmer, I'll leave you with a very small snapshot of what the new site design will look like. Don't worry about the top and left margins, that's just the program I use to design (I'm old-fashioned as far as web geeks are concerned-- I'm stuck in 1996 so I code everything by hand).

I really hope that this will be as rewarding for you as it will be for me.

But who am I kidding?

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