After a couple of weeks of experimenting with layouts, poking into the innards of Wordpress, reading books and websites about the art of blogging, tweaking settings on our blackberries and generally stalling in every possible way, I guess it’s finally time to get down to business! It’s 10pm on a Sunday night, and I have to get up early to work… So here it is… our first blog post! Ta daaa!

Like the cobbler’s kids with no shoes, it’s easy for a designer to neglect her own website when you are busy working all day on everyone else’s. I’m mortified at how long it’s been since I’ve touched or even thought about my own website. Its quaint 640×480 plain HTML frame was kind of cute in 1999, and used to bring us some good business, but now it’s frumpy and middle-aged, long forgotten in the cobwebby corners of the Internet. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that it’s adopted a bunch of stray cats. And the older it gets, the less I want to do with it!

1999 called. They want their HTML back. 

There’s nothing harder than a designer designing for herself. All your compulsive, perfectionist tendencies come out in paralyzing force. After all, I design websites for other people all day long, so mine has to be REALLY great. It has to showcase all my skills, and show lots of cool projects, and be way more awesome than anyone else’s so that people will be impressed and want to hire us. And I have to do this in my spare time, because the paying jobs always have to come first. It’s no wonder nothing ever gets done.

So, in light of my pressing need to make over my website, I’ve decided to start a blog. Why a blog, you ask? Well, I’ll give you the same reasons I give my clients when trying to convince them they need to be blogging:

• It’s easy to set up. After installing Wordpress on my server and picking out a free theme that I like and making some design modifications to it, I had a working blog within an hour. Wow!
• It’s free. Wordpress is opensource, and has loads of developers and designers offering loads of great, free templates and plugins you can start with and tweak to your liking.
• It’s easy to add content. You can create a post on the web through your Wordpress dashboard, from your computer using Windows Live Writer, or even from your blackberry or smart phone by sending an email to your Wordpress account.
• It’s the best way to get noticed. Blogs are optimized for google, right out of the box. No messing around with search engine optimization tricks and tweaks. The more you post and the more you link, the more Google smiles on you. If I want my forlorn little out-of-date website to get some love, a blog is by FAR the easiest and best way to do it.
• It’s a great way to build a reputation with your clients. By posting interesting, relevant articles and inviting feedback, people can see the way you work and think. And maybe forgive you for having such a sucky out-of-date website.

I’m going to hit "publish" now, and jump on into the blogosphere!