Thinking of a redesign

I recently wrote about my website’s 5th anniversary, and made a little retrospective of its past layouts. Which made me realize it has looked pretty much the same for the last 3 or 4 years.

Which is… really not that long? In the grand scheme of things it’s still quite recent. You can also argue that this consistency is good for my “personal brand”. You see green waves, you’re on my website (or in some of the many forks around the web). And people seem to like it. A lot of people forked, copied, or rebuilt something similar for their websites. I even got hired to branch it out into a separate template. That makes me really happy, not only because it shows that people like what I built, but because my work is helping them like many other people’s work helped me (and still do).

On the other hand, I’m a person, not a brand. I want my personal website to reflect a bit of who I am. Am I the same person I was 3-4 years ago? Yes, but not really. I changed a lot, hopefully for the better, and maybe it’s time for my website to do the same.

There’s this fear of ending up with something I don’t like as much as I like the current one. Fear that I’ll waste time or that I’ll regret the changes a year from now.

But I think that if it does actually end up objectively worse, it just means I haven’t changed enough to express myself differently, which I guess will make me happier with what it is right now. Plus, I’ll have the experience of knowing I tried. Worst case scenario, it’ll end up exactly like it is now, but with me a little wiser.

Best case scenario, the 10-years retrospective will be more interesting ;)