Web Design by Sheriar Designs: Impeccable Code | Beautiful Design

Hi Everyone. It’s been a while. Again. This time, though, I will offer not only some excuses, but also some thoughts about my life and career at the moment, this blog and it’s future, and the larger blogosphere in general.

First – Here’s What’s Been Going On With Me

To set the scene for my upcoming musing, here’s a bit about what I’ve been up to lately …

I’ve Been Designing

Lately I have been doing a lot of designing – much more so than normal – and less coding. This has been great for me. For a while I’ve felt secretly ashamed … feeling that I’m a coding queen, but less than a design rock star – at least, not the way I’d like to be. Because of all the focus on design that my career has offered me lately, I have really grown a lot in my capacity as a designer … simply by doing a lot more of it. It’s still gut-wrenching for me at times, but my arsenal of tricks, abilities, and libraries of fonts and stock photography is steadily growing and making things a bit easier. And I have been really excited about some of the designs that I have produced as of late.

I’ve Been Continuing To Figure Out The Next Career Move

Things with the ‘ole career continue to heat up and get interesting. My business partner and I continue to refine our working style and relationship, preliminary talks with the fabulous small company that we will very likely be joining forces with have begun, and we’ve even put a bid in on a space! No, it’s not in Strawberry Creek, but it’s pretty cool in it’s own right. I’ve been turning away potential clients left and right as I’ve put much of my focus toward these endeavors, as well as maintaining strong relationships with established clientele. Everything feels good, and I’m looking forward to moving into the next phase.

I’ve Been Under The Weather

I’ve been mysteriously ill, and it’s really sucked. The mysterious illness has really zapped my energy. As of this moment I remain undiagnosed, but hopefully that will change. It better, because I just let them suck 8 vials of blood out of me yesterday for testing … ouch! So, that’s been a drag.

Where’s All This Going?

Because I’ve been designing more and coding less, I’ve had less juicy tidbits of coding revelations to share with you all. I do, on the other hand, have tons of design stuff that I’d love to share but, unfortunately, cannot. I would love to show you comps, tell you about the feedback from clients, show the ultimate designs that were accepted, and all that. But, most clients would not be too happy about that, so I have to keep those things to myself. Grr.

All this exciting career stuff is, too, something that I probably shouldn’t blab about before the deal is done. Keeping quiet can be hard for me, but sometimes it’s just what has to be done.

Finally, having had a lot less energy lately than usual it’s been more difficult for me to devote time to anything deemed “unessential.” So, anything other than my basic duties as a web diva, a wife, and a mother have basically taken a backseat. This has left my blog woefully ignored.

Furthermore …

This past week I’ve taken some time to organize my resources. One of the things that needed organizing was all the bookmarks in my “webdev” folder. Wow. There were a lot of them. As I poured over them all, putting them into the appropriate folders (css layouts, javascripts, rounded corners, drop shadows, image galleries, etc, etc, etc … ) I started to have a very disquieting feeling, and the feeling was something like this: Everything has been written about. Many times. By many, many web developers. And lots of them are doing it better, or certainly at least more frequently, than I am.

Now, don’t get me wrong … this wasn’t exactly a shock … I’ve seen this coming for a while. Sure a few years ago – hell even one or two years ago – I felt like I was sittin’ real pretty with all my CSS knowledge. I was considered an “expert” by many, I felt like I was ahead of the curve and that I had a lot to share with others, I had designs in the CSS Zen Garden for God’s sake! ;~) Now, even though clearly the battle is not over, I’m feeling like there’s not a hell of a lot for me to talk about any more in the way of what the focus of my blog has always been – examples off CSS challenges and triumphs in the real world.

So What Does This Mean?

The real answer is that I don’t know. This blog has been a double-edged sword for me. On the one side, I really love to share my thoughts and ideas, and I really get off on the idea of helping people become better at what they do, the same way that others have helped me. But on the other hand, I always feel like “I should be blogging!” … and there’s an almost constant guilt at my failure to do so regularly enough.

If I’m not going to write exclusively about how to code better and whatnot, then what would I write about? The “blogosphere” itself (for the record, I really dislike that term) has grown so huge … it seems that everyone has a blog these days. And the web development blogosphere in general certainly seemed pretty saturated. Where do I fit in?

One Thing I’ve Got Going For Me …

One thing that I’ve always felt that I had going for me with this blog is my personality. No, not to say that it is the most wonderful personality in the world, but only to say that it is a personality that, I think, I let shine through in my writing more than many do (John Oxton notwithstanding). More than once friends or colleagues have told me something along the lines of, “Who cares about your code … it’s your personality that’s fun! Let’s hear more about you.” Or, “Who cares about your code … it’s your dating life that’s fascinating!” Well, the latter is probably not so true anymore now that I’m married, huh? But urgings to turn this blog into something more personal have been there almost from the beginning, but I wanted to stay on topic.

I try to let my personality come through in my writings about web development, and I think that’s something that a lot of folks have responded well to – because I am clearly a real person, who struggles with things and comes up with solutions – not always the best ones – and then shares them here with you. I’m not some Web Standards God (or Goddess, more accurately) that hands down best-practices from on high, ya know? But now that I have less web development stuff to write about, should I expand my musings to include more personal thoughts? Or is it time to put this blog to rest?

Another Idea … Write For Others?

Recently I attended the Future of Web Apps summit in San Francisco. On the first night, while at an absolutely fabulous Google party (oh man was it awesome), I chanced to meet a couple of really cool women and chatted them up a bit. Turns out that they were none other than Gillian Carson and Lisa Price from Carson Systems! We got to chatting about the lack of women at the conference and the lack of women writers at Vitamin and guess what? Yep, yours truly might have a chance to write for that esteemed online magazine. That would be pretty cool.

Or … Develop Creative Flux?

Another idea that my partner and I had was to use CreativeFlux.org as a sounding ground for the both of us, anyone from the company we’ll be working with, and any of our wonderful web friends who might want to have a place to blog, podcast, rant, share, or what-have-you. But then, would the Sheriar Designs blog die? Or would I just import content from here over to there, or vice-versa?

You See The Dilemma I’m In?

There is a lot to think about. Get more personal? Write for others where my articles will have a larger audience? Transfer my energies into Creative Flux and develop a more collaborative publishing environment? I’ve put a lot of work into developing and writing for this blog. It has brought me a lot of joy but also some anxiety. If it is to continue, I want it to be something of real value (either informative and/or entertainment) – not merely something which provides information that you can find in a dozen other places. And, I want to make sure I can fit it into my life in a way that is rewarding and not stressful. Oh, what to do!

Chime In?

I know my readers have dwindled as of late as my posts have become sparser. Even so, if you have read this far, then you must have a least a modicum of interest in what becomes of this blog. Please share your thoughts. What do you think I should do? What would you want me to do if it were up to you? What do you think of the saturation of web development blogs out there? Of the blogosphere in general? Anything that you might have to share would be helpful. At the very least, I always love hearing from you and knowing that you are out there.

Thanks.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.