After many, many months of talking about designing and building my site, I finally got a design I was happy with. However, building the site wasn’t happening because I had no real motivation other than “I would like my site online”.
Nothing was making me spend time on my own website, and my evenings have vanished in a haze of trash telly and client work.
It got me thinking about how I could motivate myself to both finish designing and building my site on a more regular basis, and then keep it updated with refreshing new content.
BOOM, it hit me
I could just deploy a crap version, and then everyone would see how unfinished it was…
Bear with me, it will make sense.
The fact that I now have a horribly unfinished, unpolished website representing what I do means that I HAVE to pull my finger out and get it finished.
After all, who wants something half-done being the first thing people see?
Brave? Stupid? Who knows, but it’s working!
If you find yourself stuck in an endless loop of re-designing, and not building, WHACK A CRAP VERSION ONLINE… it works wonders.
Let me know if this could work for you, or if I’m being a moron!
lol well done.. will becoming back just to see if this works!
Matt,
This is exactly how I feel about my personal site! And your not a moron, this is too true! It makes me put time into my site and keep fixing it up until its just the way I like it. Nice to know that there is someone who feels the same about their personal site!
Harrison
Hey found your site through the Twitter steam, nice job moron! haha don’t worry i’m eating exactly the same dog food right now.
Always difficult to motivate yourself to build out a portfolio for the 100th time, but alas we must stay ahead of the curve.
WACK A CRAP site…! HAHAHA.
Yes, I definitely agree with you on this one. Get SOMETHING out there as fast as you can, and tweak it as you go. I did the same thing with my site.
Ready, Fire, Aim! as I like to say.
Might have to force myself to doing this for my own non-existent site.
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Awesome idea! I’m not brave enough to do exactly this but you did inspire me to a create a similar project and write about it.
Hi Matt, I got here after reading either Smashing Magazine’s tweet or Vitaly Friedman’s stream on Google+. I have been thinking hard about responsive web design, and I found your website an awesome place to test the web prototype. Thank you so much….
I’m glad you’re finding it useful.
There’s a github repo for it if you wanted to download it and run it on your own site/server.
https://github.com/mattkersley/Responsive-Design-Testing
Whoa, great to see there are more people as idiosyncratic as I am out there! Same here! Motivated me to design it to look like this: http://drbl.in/bVXG from what it is now Thanks!
I just did this
Thanks Matt, for motivating me to put my half broken site up!
Oh, I borrowed the look of your notification bar which states why the site is unfinished and live. I hope you don’t mind?
Two Thumbs up and a Bow for you Matt!
I’m on an endless loop of web designs and templates changing for my unfinished blank website! Uugghhhh…..for starters I know nothing about web design…lol….had to start with learning TerMinOlgY.
Simply put, well done on your page! LMAo…..
Love your professional Logo. Glad I sTumbled onto your site!!!
I was using your responsive website testing, when I saw the disclaimer bar at the top of your site, and I just had to check it out.
I must say that it’s a cool idea, not sure if I could do it myself, but who knows what’ll happen in the future.
I can’t wait to see the progress of the site over time!
I’ve had a site for many years now that I built as a repository of news feeds. (This originally back in the day when you had to click all over the place and actually LOOK for news).
Worked well till earlier this year when the feed provider cut off the feeds to free users. There went my content and my own personal source of news.
Hence, ultimately, the reason that I found you and your site. I am redesigning my tired old site from the code of that day and in the process learning and updating my skills.
Now to the REAL reason that I am here. I wanted to thank you for such a GREAT tool as your responsive preview tool. This is the best that I have found on the web. But you already know that.
In trying to learn new standards and update / build a site for myself (my day job is working with designing and building in real-world materials) I appreciate tools. I have come to see designing and building in pixels and my day job as virtually the same except for using a different set of tools and medium.
So anyway, while I struggle along like s many of us, you have motivated me to go public with the site that I have, and then, get it done.
Thanks again!
Wow, thanks for that.
I’m glad I’m able to help, and inspire someone else to do something positive
Give us all a shout when your site is up and running… be more than happy to take a look.
It’s so very true. We almost got caught up in the never-ending redesign loop! it’s like groundhog day, you never get passed the photoshop stage. We simply put up a site so crap our server was embarrassed! It’s constantly updating still but at least it’s up and working! Good look Matt
)
This made me laugh out loud because it rang true! Like your thinking Matt.
i think its always better to put it online unfinished because then it somehow hurries you to make a fix here and there…and then after a while there is a finished beauty
)
p.s. why didn’t you use padding inside your comment box?
Such a genius idea, I did something very similar and it does work – though my site is due another rebuild/redesign lol
Amazing idea!
Hi Matt,
why is it alwaysso extremely difficult to design your own site, when one has thousands of ideas for other people?
When somebody approaches me about a website and we are talking about it, my head is full of ideas.
And than I look at my site and I say to myself “Yeah… Well… I dunno…” And start doing all the wirk again, looking for color combinations, layouts and all that stuff.
And when the site is relaunched I am still nagging
My recent design is the third in 4 weeks
Loved your post and, before I forget it, thanks a lot for giving us a site where the responsiveness of a project can be tested.
Impresses the clients a lot to see how it looks in one glance
Best regards from Berlin (Germany),
Rob