Week 1: oh boy, oh boy
…This first week did not run smoothly.
After I posted last week’s blog, I went and paid for the guitar. Then I spent the next day freaking out about how much it costs! So I didn’t get anything done on the first day.
I’ve also had some assignments to complete (since this is the last week of semester), and so those have eaten up the majority of my time. Because of this, I didn’t realize how badly I had planned my website until midway through the week. Let me run you through it.
Over the weekend I began the HTML and CSS for my website, basing it on my Figma prototype. I had to make my own Medium.com SVG file as Feather doesn’t have one. Luckily, this was just three circles and I was done!
Then, I finished up my first prototype based on the Figma mock-up. It wasn’t responsive, nor was it particularly functional:
Here I imported Google’s Alata font for the body text (first time importing Google fonts!) and was pretty happy with what I had completed up until this point.
…and then I got stuck.
For whatever reason, I couldn’t figure out how anything was meant to be fitting together, and the cocktail of code that I wrote mixing with what I had copy-pasted, all started clashing with each other. The only functional bit was the icon bar at the top left, and that didn’t even match my initial design!
My next idea was to try and work on each component separately, and I used this guide to try and mask the ‘buymyguitar’ logo with the tortoiseshell image I’m using on these blogs. After some tinkering, I realized that -webkit CSS styles weren’t compatible with all browsers, and it wasn’t like I was getting anything to work properly anyway.
I felt that I had essentially wasted 4 days following a half-baked plan. I wasn’t learning anything new either, since was already using previous knowledge, or I was just copy-pasting. I began worrying that this whole plan was doomed from the start, that if I couldn’t build my own designs then how could I expect to do anything more!
And that’s when it hit me, my own designs. I did all that Figma planning before I truly understood my own capabilities!! Sure, the mock-up looks simple. But that doesn’t mean it’s simple to code — at least with my current skillset.
Furthermore, I was straying too far away from a minimum viable product.
Do I need a fancy icon box? — Yes, since I want people to see my GitHub, LinkedIn, Medium & Email.
Do I need a progress bar? — Also yes, but it doesn’t have to be a fancy CSS-styled thing just yet — an image will do just fine to convey what I mean.
I needed to take better note of my skills. At least for right now, I have to aim for things that I *know* I’m capable of, and not push the boundaries until I’m ready. If I had ended this week with nothing, I would have certainly been unhappy & not continued with this project.
But if I can whip up a quick single-page link-hub in an evening, why don’t I just do that?
A sub-par product is better than none, especially if I can come back and improve it later. Not to mention, this week was meant to get the ball rolling — I don’t need to revolutionize the blog homepage genre.
If you’d like, you can see me get the ball rolling on GitHub Pages: https://aidandayvyd.github.io/
The lessons from this week are that I don’t need to be a perfectionist, and that my designs aren’t set in stone. It’s better to do something rather than nothing, which I guess is what this project is all about.
My website is not at all perfect, but it is good enough for now. I have three more assignments to get through, then I can use the forward momentum of completing something to really hit the ground running.
The first dozen projects are aways rough, so you might as well get them out of the way *now* (Internet Shaquille)
Speaking of…. what project am I doing next?
