It’s done. It’s over. Finally. After an entire year, and four full remakes (complete with design and code), I finally published my own personal website.

To be honest, I never thought it would happen. It had been so long, and I’d gone through so many iterations, that I just accepted it as a part of my life that I’d be working on countless versions of my personal websites without ever publishing one.

But once I got this one close to finishing, ish, my girlfriend kept pestering me every single day to just finish and publish it. And I’m so grateful to her for that. I’m 100% sure that this would have gone on for at least another couple years (and a number of other remakes) if she hadn’t done that.

A state of unhappiness

I don’t think anyone is happy with what they create for themselves. I was discussing this topic with one of my previous coworkers some time ago, and he agreed with me passionately. He’s been both designing and coding websites for quite a few years, and he was telling me how he had never been able to create anything for himself, nor for the company he’s co-founded.

When we creators do work for ourselves, we are extremely critical of every single aspect every step of the way; essentially, the world is going to judge our skills! “If he did such an awful job on his personal website, who knows how awful his other work is.“

And then there’s the imposter syndrome problem among a lot of us. “People are going to know I’m awful at this. They’re going to look at my code and know how awful I am at this. I can’t code for shit. I can’t design for shit. I’m a big sham.”

I had been thinking this way for quite a while. Nothing ever worked. Nothing ever made sense. Even though I kept telling myself it would be fine, it never really got to a point where I was ever happy with the results.

I mean, yeah, of course I’d start with something and be excited about it for a short period, but then that sudden realization would hit me. “This is awful. What the hell was I thinking?!” Along with a lot of client work on the side, I’d be left completely having forgotten about what I was even doing.

The thing is, a lot of the time when trying to get new clients, I needed that website to show them who I was and what I did. And that (together with my girlfriend pestering me) is what essentially pushed me to push the website.

The acceptance phase

There’s a certain phase that comes after the rollercoaster of emotions, from “Oh, I’m loving this!” to “What in god’s name am I doing?” where you just kind of… accept it.

In your head you’re like “Eh, fuck it. It is what it is.” And to be quite honest, that’s the most important phase in the entire process. This is the phase that helps produce a success story.

It’s just that it’s a bit hard to get to that phase. Your brain doesn’t let you get there because of all the judgement you need to be doing to yourself. But once you do get there, it’s all a cruise. Or is it?

The aftermath

I published my website over a month ago. I got pretty good response on reddit in the /r/design_critiques subreddit, with some great feedback.

But most importantly, it helped me land a couple of new clients, along with a remote part-time job that I’m really happy with. So it was definitely worth it giving in and just doing it.

Wanna know how long it took me to want to redo the entire thing? One week. One week after publishing, I looked at it and realized, this needs to change. For good reason though.

I feel like the website doesn’t do a good job of promoting me as a UX/UI designer and front-end developer, it just feels like a “personal website”. And according to a few good people over on the /r/design_critiques subreddit, I should have added case studies to every project, which I want to do in the new website. And make it prettier. And better.

Ugh. Maybe in a couple of years…

For anyone wondering, my website is located at https://www.edinabazi.com