Web Design Development Articles

My first site wasn’t necessarily picture perfect, but it was immensely valuable.  The experience of putting it all together was great, giving me both the confidence and some of the tools necessary to make gains on future projects.

Here are three things I learned from building my first website.

You can’t break anything.  Building a site isn’t like building a house or an engine for a car.  If you goof, the whole thing doesn’t fall apart.  You can’t do any real damage.  You can go back and make adjustments until it’s just the way you want it.  That may seem obvious, but when you really understand that on a deeper level, it liberates you.  It gives you a green light to experiment and improve.  It also expands your comfort zone considerably.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat.  I had an idea in mind for my first site and I set it out to create that vision I’d been holding in my imagination.  After a little trial and error I realized that I could accomplish what I wanted using the framework that I had in place, but that there was a much easier way of doing the same thing.  I tossed that framework, rebuilt, and followed the best way to reach my goal.  The point is that I could’ve reached the same ends through different means.  That’s one of the coolest things about building a site.  You have flexibility.

Learning from others makes a difference.  By nature I’m a do-it-yourselfer.  I like attacking projects on my own without any assistance, figuring things out as I go along.  Fortunately, when I was building my first website, I didn’t go about it that way.  I was just worried enough about my ability to get things done that I consulted a few website building tutorials and even purchased an ebook to help me get the results I wanted.  That study and expert guidance really paid off, too.  It made the process much easier than trying to learn on the fly.

Those are just a few of the things I learned while building my first site.  Those three lessons stand out because they’re still principles that matter to me today.  One every project I tackle, I try to combine a willingness to be creative with flexibility and expert guidance.  I’ve found that combination makes building every website–whether it’s your first or your hundredth–easier and more productive.