I’m so excited to launch my new website! This has been a long-time coming. It was a bit of a case of the shoemaker whose children had no shoes in that I’ve been telling myself for a while that I wanted to redo my website, but I just couldn’t light a fire to get the project started. It can be difficult for a designer to work on her own marketing materials (at least that has been my experience). Part of the reason is because I thrive on the designer/client relationship. When I’m designing for myself, I am both the designer and the client, and although I can’t complain about myself harassing me to work faster, or that I rejected the first 10 drafts, I do have some gripes with myself, the client:

I don’t provide enough information to the designer to get started.

Now I can really understand where my clients are coming from when I ask them for content and any photos they have before I get started on their project, and I can see them looking at me through their oddly brief and much delayed email with blank stares, like “Content? What content?”

This conundrum required me to sit down with myself and ask myself a bunch of questions: Who is my audience? What do I want them to know about me? How can I convey my value to them? How can I let them really get to know me in just a few paragraphs? I recently attended a lunch-n-learn where we talked a lot about our own brands. I had to really think about my brand, and decided it should reflect my authentic self. If you know me at all, you know that I’m hard-working, flexible, and let’s be honest, super-fun to work with 😉 I hope these sentiments come across in my new site.

I’m not strict on my own deadlines (because they don’t exist)

Go figure; without a real deadline looming, I just could not motivate myself to start this project. Alas! I got an email from my web host provider that my renewal was coming up, and I had previously decided that I wanted to switch hosts. This gave me a tangible date by which I wanted to launch my new website so I could make a clean switch to the new host. Thank goodness for deadlines imposed by others! If only someone could give me a timeframe for me to create my family’s photo book for 2017 (it’s currently June of 2018), I’d be golden.

I’m too easy to please

When I do work for a client, I present a draft, and then they react to it. Usually it’s positive, but even so, there’s always room for improvement. My second draft is almost always better than the first because client feedback is helpful. When I’m my own client, the feedback can sound a little like, “Great job! Now you should take some time off and go to the pool!”

It takes a lot of thought and discipline to step back from my work, assess it from an outside lens and provide a meaningful critique. But once I buckled down, stopped shopping for bathing suits online, and got to it, I was pretty pleased with what I had to offer.

So there you have it: I’m better at being a designer than a client. Hope you take a few minutes to look around my new site!