Hellooo worrrrrrld…

Right, I’ve finally finished building myself a site, it’s taken long enough. Suppose I had better actually start writing stuff down now…

Have never had a blog before, and to be honest didn’t think I would be the kind of person to ever have one, but read a few things recently which really highlighted the benefits to me. Firstly, I read “On Personal Branding” (which is a great read), where Brad Frost talks about how his website is his online hub, where people know they can find him, contact him, even “read his thoughts”… He says:

Jobs, technologies and trends come and go, but you as an individual remain.

And I really like that idea – no matter where your life goes; job changes, interest changes, technology changes, having your own site sort of creates an archive of your personality which you can look back on and remember how you used to think, what you used to find interesting. I like to think that I can look back on writing this in five years and think, “wow, you really didn’t know what you were doing then did you…”.

Ahhhh! Scary!

Although I think just having a personal website is definitely a step in the right direction in terms of personal branding, if your site is just a brief bio with some pictures and links, there isn’t much room for people to actually get to know you. Actually writing down your thoughts on the other hand, putting yourself out there, that’s a different story, an altogether more terrifying one…

That is in fact the main reason why I have never even been tempted to blog before, just the idea that as soon as you hit ‘publish’ it’s out there in internetland for all to see, to judge. But having just finished reading Mike Monteiro’s Design is a job, I changed my mind. I learned that in fact not many people are naturally good writers, not many people can expect to produce wisdom, wit and insight without self-consciously staring at a blank screen for half an hour before even typing a word. And so that makes me feel better. As Mike puts it:

Write! Design! Put yourself out there. Let history decide whether it’s crap or not.

So that’s what I’m going to do – life’s too short to be scared of writing your opinions publicly every now and then. And so I plan on writing on here as regularly as possible, hopefully once in a while I might even say something useful.