I have spent the better part of the last thirty years creating websites, which sounds much more impressive than it actually is. Over that time, I have designed hundreds of them—probably enough to qualify as a minor case study in digital restlessness. I have built sites about photography, travel, hobbies, observations, food, and various other subjects that seemed absolutely fascinating at the time. I have chosen themes, adjusted fonts, rearranged menus, changed colors, redesigned headers, experimented with layouts, moved things six pixels to the left, and generally done everything possible to avoid the one thing a website is actually supposed to contain: something worth reading.
The problem is that I have always been much better at creating the website than creating the content for it. Give me a blank WordPress installation and I am suddenly full of energy. I can spend an entire afternoon deciding whether the sidebar should be 280 or 300 pixels wide. I can debate typography with the seriousness of someone negotiating a peace treaty. I will happily install a new theme just to see what it looks like, then spend three days making it look exactly like the old theme I just replaced. Designing a website feels productive. Writing a post, on the other hand, requires sitting down and actually having something to say.
And so the pattern has repeated itself for thirty years. A new idea appears. I get excited. A domain is registered. A theme is selected. The site is designed. The colors are carefully chosen. The navigation is perfected. A beautiful home page emerges from the digital wilderness. For a brief and glorious period, I am convinced that this is the website that will finally last.
Then comes the writing.
Suddenly, that previously exciting blank page begins to look less like an opportunity and more like an accusation.
I write a few posts. Maybe several. Sometimes I even become genuinely enthusiastic and imagine myself publishing regularly for years. Then life happens, enthusiasm wanders off, and the website slowly becomes a beautifully designed monument to good intentions. Eventually I stop visiting it. The domain expires, the hosting gets canceled, or I simply decide that what the internet really needs is another completely new website.
So I build another one.
This has happened hundreds of times.
There is something wonderfully absurd about spending thirty years repeatedly creating websites that don’t survive long enough to develop an audience. Most people start a blog because they have something they want to say and then figure out how to present it. I have tended to do the opposite. I figure out how to present something, and then spend considerable time wondering what, exactly, I intended to say.
Perhaps that is why I have never really thought of myself as a blogger. I am more of a website designer who occasionally wanders into blogging by accident.
The irony is that I genuinely enjoy the process of building a website. I like the structure of it. I like deciding where things go. I like the relationship between photographs, text, menus, white space, typography, and all the little details that most visitors will never consciously notice. I can become completely absorbed in making a site feel right.
Writing is different. Writing leaves nowhere to hide. You can’t adjust the margins when you don’t know what to say. You can’t install a plugin that will magically produce an interesting thought. There is no setting under Appearance → Customize labeled “Make This Person More Interesting.”
I have occasionally wondered whether all those abandoned websites were failures. Perhaps they were. But I have also come to think of them as practice. Each one taught me something about design, photography, writing, technology, and, perhaps most importantly, myself. They were experiments. Some lasted years; others barely survived their first redesign. A few were abandoned because I lost interest. Others were replaced simply because I had a new idea and apparently no ability whatsoever to leave a perfectly good website alone.
And now, after thirty years of this, I find myself doing it again.
There is another website. Another design. Another carefully considered layout. Another collection of possibilities sitting there waiting to become something.
The difference this time is that I know my weakness.
The real challenge isn’t building the website.
I’ve been doing that for thirty years.
The real challenge is staying long enough to actually write something.