So what’s up with all the changes? What happened to the idea of branding to develop name recognition? Why does this site keep changing — daily?
A key skill of the instructional design (ID) business — or any business, for that matter, that is carried out using regularly-changing technology — is flexibility. I’m using my own website to build my own flexibility, learning a new WordPress theme while trying to maintain (within a very limited understanding of the subject matter) some semblance of a brand (colors, fonts, logos…whatever I can scrap together).
Nearly every one of my projects requires learning something and taking an action to get the job started or done:
- Gotta learn something new? Start researching it.
- Need to learn it in quick order? Find a safe place to practice.
- Want to run a beta test on your idea? Find a real-to-life space to fiddle around.
I needed to learn the basic ropes of a new WordPress theme, and how to customize it. What better place to learn the basics than on my own website where real potential customers and current customers checking in might drop in with no notice. At once, I need to keep the site up and running, and at least navigable and readable while maintaining a hint of my visual brand. Yes, I’m my own guinea pig. And I’m okay with it.
For those techies who might be wondering: This site was put together with Divi without using PageBuilder, specifically to see how much customization could be done without PageBuilder and with minimal manual coding.
(WordPress is invading my dreams with “how to do this…how to do that…what if I try something like…” You know what I mean? Such is the life of learning and doing with every new project.)