The Joys of Doing it Yourself
One of the things I love most about being in business for myself is that I have time to learn what I want learn, to do what I want to do. One of the things I hate most about being in business for myself is that I have to learn what I want to get done, to do what I want done. Conundrum? Yep!
Deciding when to hire something out and when to do it yourself can be tough at times. I'm in the middle of redesigning one of my content sites, CheapCooking.com. I did the current design about 3 years ago I think, when I wanted to learn how to do web sites without tables, using divs instead. I'm not a designer. Not that kind of designer. Logic. Workflow. Functionality. All those things I design. Colors. Fonts. Images. Those I stay away from, so it's a plain site and always will be. This current design (not yet live) is actually even simpler.
One of the things I wanted to do was make the recipes print out better. Of course, I only remembered that part after I thought I was done with the design and had "touched" about 80 pages. Aaargh. Then I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to get it to actually work! I wanted the printout to be something people could save easily and cook from. I wanted it to have my web site name on it and the copyright information, but not the ads and other miscellaneous stuff like the newsletter sign-up. I emailed a colleague in total frustration, knowing he could solve my problem in about 2 minutes if I asked. But all I did was whine. He gave me a hint. I went and looked online at a few web sites where I knew this was done well and finally got it, one step at a time of course. But it felt great!
I emailed my colleague back, patting myself on the back this time. ;) It felt great to figure it out by myself and understand it. This guy has offered to help me make the site even better but I'm afraid of losing control of it, of not being able to change what I want to change when I want to change it.
There's other stuff I'm happy to farm out. I pay for a newsletter service. I have no interest in building that from scratch! I did, however, just find an open source php mailing list program and installed it for the "cabana" swim club whose site and newsletter I run as a volunteer. So far so good. But that's about all I want to figure out about mailing lists.
The decision point for me is about the fun. Figuring out a print css and how to set up my Dreamweaver template correctly so things did and did not print, as I wanted, pushed me to learn some new things. It was a challenge, but it wasn't beyond me. It was fun. It's good to keep learning. I'm glad I didn't ask for help too soon.
Deciding when to hire something out and when to do it yourself can be tough at times. I'm in the middle of redesigning one of my content sites, CheapCooking.com. I did the current design about 3 years ago I think, when I wanted to learn how to do web sites without tables, using divs instead. I'm not a designer. Not that kind of designer. Logic. Workflow. Functionality. All those things I design. Colors. Fonts. Images. Those I stay away from, so it's a plain site and always will be. This current design (not yet live) is actually even simpler.
One of the things I wanted to do was make the recipes print out better. Of course, I only remembered that part after I thought I was done with the design and had "touched" about 80 pages. Aaargh. Then I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to get it to actually work! I wanted the printout to be something people could save easily and cook from. I wanted it to have my web site name on it and the copyright information, but not the ads and other miscellaneous stuff like the newsletter sign-up. I emailed a colleague in total frustration, knowing he could solve my problem in about 2 minutes if I asked. But all I did was whine. He gave me a hint. I went and looked online at a few web sites where I knew this was done well and finally got it, one step at a time of course. But it felt great!
I emailed my colleague back, patting myself on the back this time. ;) It felt great to figure it out by myself and understand it. This guy has offered to help me make the site even better but I'm afraid of losing control of it, of not being able to change what I want to change when I want to change it.
There's other stuff I'm happy to farm out. I pay for a newsletter service. I have no interest in building that from scratch! I did, however, just find an open source php mailing list program and installed it for the "cabana" swim club whose site and newsletter I run as a volunteer. So far so good. But that's about all I want to figure out about mailing lists.
The decision point for me is about the fun. Figuring out a print css and how to set up my Dreamweaver template correctly so things did and did not print, as I wanted, pushed me to learn some new things. It was a challenge, but it wasn't beyond me. It was fun. It's good to keep learning. I'm glad I didn't ask for help too soon.
posted by Ellen at 5:58 PM
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