The tangled web we weave

It’s great being busy and thankfully I nearly always am. This is why it’s taken me so long to find time to get my own house in order. But I’ve now got around to assembling the new office furniture that’s been in the corner of my studio since last Autumn and more importantly I’ve updated my ancient website. Cue fanfare!

For someone who advises clients on the importance of good design and staying current, I need to sit on the naughty step for how remiss I’ve been in looking after my own web affairs. My crumbling old site hadn’t been updated in a long time, despite there being plenty to show off about. The problem was I was too busy making my clients look good to get around to dressing myself!

With the new year, I blocked out time to work on the Soft Octopus website. These things always take longer to implement than one would expect. There’s work to select, images to be rendered and composited, content to write and a site structure to consider, what needs to be kept and what can go? In the end I decided to discard about 90% of the content of my old site and start the new year with something brand new. There’s very little legacy content and my old octopus’s garden where clients would once share their own octopus drawings is now history. Sorry, everything has its day.

It’s a long time since I designed a website, with Dreamweaver being a distant memory. WordPress functionality is where it’s at now, so finding the right person to work with was crucial. The best designers are those that can flexibly accommodate the demands of their clients, and ‘no’ should be something one avoids saying. Design is often about problem solving and I was lucky to be connected up with Callum at Sparkz Network who ably realised all of my pernickety visual and structural requirements for the website, and we both got through the commission with smiles on our faces.

Finding the right design is important but so is finding the right people to work with and I love the fact that almost all of my work comes through recommendation and now I can point clients to a website I can be proud of again. Better late than never.