This question comes to the fore of my mind in light of a recent ‘glitch’ involving my website. The glitch was entirely my own fault. A few days ago I noticed that my sub-domains weren’t showing up. This was obviously of some concern to me because I use my primary domain and sub-domains daily or more.
I emailed my server host, explained what was going on, and asked if there had been a configuration change that had gone through recently. Support emailed me back with a quick and to the point answer – I had forgotten to renew my hosting plan and it expired.
Whoops.
It was handled easily, and took a couple of days for the domain configuration to repopulate through the lists, but it brought me to this article. So often web developers get wrapped up in handling many sites for clients, that neglecting their own websites is quite a common result.
I have, for personal and business use, about seven sites that are simply for ‘me.’ The only ones that are updated with some regularity are the ones related to my web business, and the one that is updated the most (often daily – weekly at a minimum) is my blog here. I have a site that I haven’t touched in about 8 years. (Nowadays, I’m tempted to keep that one as it is for a bit of nostalgia.)
In any event, it got me thinking about the web developers I know, and how often we get wrapped up in doing work on client sites that we just keep putting off work on our own site. Instead of redesigning my own site, I find myself tending to use and promote a design made by someone else, and use my new designs as free download templates. I know that if the choice was to redesign my own site, I would put it off for years (I have in the past). To that end, if I really needed a redesign and didn’t want it put off, I would simply hire another web developer to do it so that it would actually get done. Of course, I probably won’t do that because I have the need to constantly change the design I have for my blog and main site, and I’d need it changed several times a year at least. Due to that, it’s simply easier for me to use templates and just rotate designs. I could work part time just redesigning my own site every two months with a few templates, and I’m not willing to spend that much time on it.
It’s terribly ironic in some ways, because web developers who create some amazing designs, often have rather neglected personal websites. You might not ever know what they were capable of doing, but for examples of their work. I suppose for those of us that are afflicted by this issue of ‘personal site neglect’ – it’s probably not a good thing. We should highlight what we can do more, but after a long day of designing… it’s often easy to just keep putting it off tile next time.
~Nicole
