Excuse the provocative title, but I’ve just dashed out of my office to the comfort of my bed and laptop to lick the wounds of wasting the better part of around 10 hours re-designing my website to be something of beauty.

I failed.

Somewhere around the 6 hour mark I really felt I had it and had begun to build the damn thing in .html, and the hours ticked by further.

Its a minimal little thing stopping at the 600 pixel height mark to ensure it’s good looks are maintained (hey, you can’t be funky and stylish with tons and tons of text all over the place like on the current site) and so I was forced to slash and cut huge swathes of existing content as I went – hey ho, it was all in the name of the ‘great new design’ so worth it.

I ignored the nagging thoughts that there were no way my blog pages could be created in this exact same ‘not straight lines’ sort of design and pushed onwards…telling myself that the blog pages, with their required straight lines could simply echo the spirit of the main pages.

Then about 30 mins ago I suddenly realised that there really wasn’t anything particularly wonderful, stylish or innovative about my ‘great new design’ and in fact it was pretty lame. Thats when I ran to my blog to cry about it.

Not once in five years have I managed to design myself a really amazing and stylish website, in fact I’ve managed ‘professional’ at best and I know if I can’t design my own website and do a good job of it, that DIY design is definitely a fools gold for any business owner who isn’t even a designer by trade.

There you wade in, thinking you can save yourself some money by doing it yourself, especially in my position when I’m an actual ‘designer’ and all you end up with is an inferior version of the brand style you could have had if you had paid someone with the following skills;

- Better design skills and more experience in design than yourself, but more than that;
- FRESH EYES maybe?

I’ve heard many a designer complain that they can’t design as well for themselves as they can for their clients, maybe our issue is lack of fresh eyes. We’re too inside the business to really create something fresh for it. Perhaps we are trapped in the suffocating box of our perception of our brand and therefore can’t be fresh about a revamp of the style.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Again thoughts lean towards hiring someone to do the job for me, I hesitate however because maybe I’m actually just impossible to satisfy. I do think that I could potentially hire another designer to create something fabulous for me, but then what if the issue is that everything that is designed ends up looking crud after a few hours now matter now much I liked it at first. I’d hate to waste money like that.

Or maybe I quite simply (and arrogantly) refuse to believe that I cannot get around this issue by just ‘trying harder’. If anyone has any advice for me on how to be creative for MYSELF I’d be most grateful!

I’m so peeved I can’t even be bothered to add an image to this blog. I’m now going to look at other designers websites and mentally beat myself up for not being as good.