On the anxiety of building my personal web site

This post was first published on my personal WordPress.com blog. It was migrated here for historical reasons (and because I am a compulsive completionist) and may have been edited from its original form and content.

I have discovered that I have been feeling a great anxiety over the looming task of building my web site (jonas.ninja). There’s nearly nothing there right now. I’d like to make it something, an extension of my personal brand. It’s kind of important! And so I panic, because in my mind I see visions of grand design, subtle visual effects and masterful content organization.

Well, that’s all nonsense. I don’t have a brand yet, so I can’t do a poor job of redesigning it. There is no established user base to be confused by a dramatic change in layout and style. And there’s certainly no content to be lost in poor navigation. My anxiety sprouted from that mixed blessing of perfectionism which drives me to make everything right the first time, for all time. In truth, I am as free as I could possibly be to make any web site that suffices my needs.

And that’s really the key word. Suffice. One of the few bits of knowledge I gained from my education is that iterative prototyping is a better way of arriving at excellence than building on assumptions and unproven theories. Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell also seem to think this applies to life in general. So perhaps I’ll make a series of barely-sufficient sites, or slowly improve on the initial one over time. The important thing is to stop panicking because my goal is not to make a masterpiece.