Aggregating my distributed self

Miriam Suzanne’s in the middle of a redesign of her personal website. It began in August 2022. She’s made an entire series out of the work that’s worth your time, but I wanted to call out the fifth and latest installment because she presents a problem that I think we can all relate to:

But the walls got in my way. Instead of minimal renovation, I got just far enough to live with it and then started a brand new Eleventy repo.

The plan was to prototype […] and bring back well-formed solutions. To echo Dave Rupert, prototyping is useful. It’s easier to play with new ideas when you’re not carrying a decade of content and old code along with you.

But prototyping evolved into what I would call tinkering (complimentary). Maybe I mean procrastinating (also complimentary), but it’s a wandering process that also helps me better understand what I want from a website. I might not make visible progress over two years, but I start to form a point of view […]. Keeping things easy is always where things get complicated. And it brings me back to where my redesign started – a desire to clarify the information architecture. Not only for visitors, but for myself.

Don’t even tell me you’ve never been there! Jim Neilsen blogged along similar lines. You get a stroke of inspiration that’s the kernel of some idea that motivates you to start, you know, working on it. There’s no real plan, perhaps. The idea and inspiration are more than enough to get you going… that is until you hit a snag. And what I appreciate about Miriam’s post is that she’s calling out content as the snag. Well, not so much a snag as a return to the founding principle for the redesign: a refined content architecture.

• Sometimes I do events where I speak, or teach a workshop, or perform. Events happen at a time and place.
• Sometimes I create artifacts like a book or an album, a website, or specification. Artifacts often have a home URL. They might have a launch date, but they are not date-specific.
• Some of my projects are other channels with their own feeds, their own events and artifacts.
• Those channels are often maintained by an organization that I work with long-term. A band, a web agency, a performance company, etc.

These boundaries aren’t always clean. A post that remains relevant could be considered an artifact. Events can generate artifacts, and vice versa. An entire organization might exist to curate a single channel.

So, Miriam’s done poking at visual prototypes and ready to pour the filling into the pie crust. I relate with this having recently futzed with the content architecure of this site. I find it tough to start with a solidified design before I know what content is going into it. But I also find it tough to work with no shape at all. In my case, CSS-Tricks has a well-established design that’s evolved, mostly outside of me. I love the design but it’s an inherited one and I’m integrating content around it. Design is the constraint. If I had the luxury of stripping the building to the studs, I might take a different approach because then I could “paint” around it. Content would be the constraint.

It’s yet another version of the Chicken-Egg dilemma. I still think of the (capital-W) Web as a content medium at least in a UA style sense in that it’s the default. It’s more than that, of course. I’m a content designer at heart (and trade) but I’m hesitant to cry “content is king” which reminded me of something I wrote for an end-of-year series we did here answering the question: What is one thing people can do to make their website better? My answer: Read your website.

We start to see the power of content when we open up our understanding of what it is, what it does, and where it’s used. That might make content one of the most extensible problem-solving tools in your metaphorical shed—it makes sites more accessible, extracts Google-juicing superpowers, converts sales, and creates pathways for users to accomplish what they need to do.

And as far as prioritizing content or design, or…?

The two work hand-in-hand. I’d even go so far as to say that a lot of design is about enhancing what is communicated on a page. There is no upstaging one or the other. Think of content and design as supporting one another, where the sum of both creates a compelling call-to-action, long-form post, hero banner, and so on. We often think of patterns in a design system as a collection of components that are stitched together to create something new. Pairing content and design works much the same way.

I’d forgotten those words, so I appreciate Miriam giving me a reason to revisit them. We all need to be recalibrated every so often — swap out air filters, top off the fluids, and rotate the ol’ tires. And an old dog like me needs it a little more often. I spent a few more minutes in that end-of-year series and found a few other choice quotes about the content-design continuum that may serve as inspiration for you, me, or maybe even Miriam as she continues the process of aggragating her distributed self.

This sounds serious, but don’t worry — the site’s purpose is key. If you’re building a personal portfolio, go wild! However, if someone’s trying to file a tax return, whimsical loading animations aren’t likely to be well-received. On the other hand, an animated progress bar could be a nice touch while providing visual feedback on the user’s action.

Remember, the web is an interactive platform — take advantage of that, where appropriate (less is more, accessibility is integral, and you need to know your audience). Whether that’s scrollytelling, captioned video, and heck, maybe for your audience, now’s the time to start looking into AR/VR! Who knows. Sometimes you just need to try stuff out and see what sticks. Just be careful. Experimentation is great, but we need to make sure we’re bringing everyone along for the ride.

Your personal site is a statement of who you are and what you want to do. If you showcase your favorite type of work, you’ll get more requests for similar projects or jobs — feeding back into a virtuous cycle of doing more of what you love.

And one of my favorites:

But the prime reason to have a personal website is in the name: it is your personalhome on the web. Since its early days, the web has been about sharing information and freedom of expression. Personal websites still deliver on that promise. Nowhere else do you have that much freedom to create and share your work and to tell your personal story. It is your chance to show what you stand for, to be different, and to be specific. Your site lets you be uniquely you and it can be whatever you imagine it to be.

So if you have a personal site, make sure to put in the work and attention to make it truly yours. Make it personal. Fine-tune the typography, add a theme switcher, or incorporate other quirky little details that add personality. As Sarah Drasner writes, you can feel it if a site is done with care and excitement. Those are the sites that are a joy to visit and will be remembered.

That last one has the added perk of reminding me how incredibly great Sarah Drasner is.

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