New Year, New Website
The motivations and struggles behind redesigning my own website
Every web designer knows how challenging it is to redesign and maintain your own website. The shoemaker’s children often go barefoot, as the cliché goes.
My professional website, Owltastic, has gone through many redesigns since its birth in 2008 (hard to believe it just passed the 10 year mark!). Before Owltastic, I worked under my own name — using a domain which turned out to be impossible to spell and easy to forget — so I decided to create a site under the emblem of my favorite animal, an owl.
I adopted owls as my symbol for many reasons: I aspire to be more wise, I am somewhat nocturnal, and they look like adorable flying cats. Also we had owls around our house that made lots of noise and kept my dad awake at night, “just like my daughter did,” as Dad jokes.
At first Owltastic was primarily a blog (back when we all still had blogs). I wrote about a mix of personal topics, as well as design and development (I was mainly excitedly discovering CSS3 back then). It eventually grew into a place to find out about my speaking engagements, see my latest work, see…
