What I learned Building My Website
In 2021, I was 3D’ed as I was depressed, devastated, and discombobulated. It has been 6 years since I left my stable comfortable job at Saudi Aramco and I had been sprinting ever since chasing experiences at places where I did not know a soul. The relentless pursuit, being in a job that I did not enjoy, and Covid took a toll on my mental health which led to leaving my job and taking a sabbatical.
While 2021/2022 was tough and terrifying, it was very creative, informative and liberating as I embarked on a deep journey reflecting, writing and building my own website. Today, I want to share with you my journey where I will cover:
Why did I decide to have a website?
Becoming my real self
As I moved, changed course, travelled, and dived head first into my fears, every false façade shattered, every deceiving notion disappeared, and I was left with my real self. Putting myself out there helps me in preserving this distilled clarity and encourages others to find their own( real!) selves.
Igniting the ( creator!) fire within!
Creating, teaching, writing, and sharing invigorates me and stimulates me in unthinkable ways whether it is a random loom video, a well laid out strategy document, a playbook, a presentation, or an article that will only be read by a handful of hungry eager folks. This will keep me super engaged and focused on my career and life. Also, I will become a better writer and hopefully motivate & inspire others along the way.
Learning by doing!
I was overwhelmed and did not know how to start. I could have outsourced it from day 1 but I decided to get my hands dirty. My learning is highly correlated to me doing things by myself and this was a good opportunity to:
- Develop a product thinking mindset which is crucial to my craft as a product marketing leader and a builder.
- Dabble with HTML and CSS and understand the fundamentals of how a web page works. This will make me a better marketer, save me time, and propel me to learn coding.
Experiencing my website as a journey!
Phase 1: “Fighting Resistance”
Resistance is surreal and I could not find a better construct of what resistance is than that of Steven Pressfield is his book “The War of Art” where he explains:
Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.
Resistance manifested in 2 distinct voices:
- “You are vain. You are fake and you are artificially curating your best moments here.” To counter this, I realized that having a website is one of the best ways to show your real self. Also, the bulk of the website content is based on deep reflections, real narratives and experiences.
- “You have no real substance. Why even bother building a website then?”. Resistance is deceitful and wouldn’t tell you the bare naked truth. It will give you plausible, rational justifications of why you should abandon your plans. Mine was you have nothing valuable to add and it will take forever till you have formed your thoughts. Immediately, I decided to write numerous articles and have it ready. I escaped resistance by taking 2 simple yet extremely crucial decisions:
- I held myself accountable by announcing to my snapchat friends that I will start a 30 days writing challenge where I share random thoughts about life.
- To remove friction, I decided to write my thoughts daily on my phone using the Samsung notes app. My plan was simple: Forget SEO. Forego Structure. Just be yourself and write about what you go through on a daily basis. You can see these thoughts here.
Phase 2 “Death by abundant choices”
Having a plethora of choices is mentally taxing. Too many choices can overwhelm us and lead to suboptimal decision. Should I WordPress it, wix it, webflow it, or square space it ?
Eventually I opted to use WordPress since it is very customizable, scalable, and easy to learn given the abundant resources available around using it and its strong community.
I am not here to go over every step as it will get expansive and this is beyond the scope of this blog but I will share key steps and learnings I went through:
Website hosting does not equal domain name registration
While it might be apparent to the average programmer, it was not apparent to me. I’ve chosen Bluehost to do both settling for abbagevolves as my domain name.
Understanding the job of a theme vs the job of a page builder
In layman terms, WordPress theme allows you to design the blog and the page builder allows you to design the look and feel for your website. Initially, I went with Divi Theme as it is a powerful WordPress theme and a complete design framework that allows you to customize everything from the ground up.
What about your logo?
I went with logology where I designed my logo in literally less than 10 minutes. Shout out to the talented Dagobert Renouf
Designing is your perfect seasoning; Your perfect juicy steak is your content
Content is everything from your homepage to your thoughts. Anything from your forms to CTAs. It will force you to empathize with your reader and dig deeper on why you are writing in the first place.
Designing your website is not straightforward
While I had a functional website and I played with HTML and CSS to change the look of my website, I was not happy with it and I needed a simple minimalistic good looking design. I decided to hire a freelancer to take it to the next level. I wrote a master document where I laid down the content of the website, my goals, and inspirational websites and designs. I was fortunate to have found the talented Vasily Gritsay
Lesson learned from building my personal website
The hero thinks does
The hero does. The hero doesn’t convince.
The hero doesn’t debate. The hero does not strategize.
The hero does. The hero puts his strategy into action. This is what Jeff Bezos calls “Bias for action“. You ought to find what is broken or missing by doing. Key lesson here: Do, Do, Do.
At the core of every web page, you have living words
I become fanatic about perfecting the look and feel of my website. However, words are the essence and the core of what you ought to convey. Also, the biggest hurdle to overcome is having the actual content!
Creation is very satisfying but also hard
I just realized how building and creating is extremely satisfying but also filled with hurdles, hardship and frustration along the way. The good part, you would arrive having learned loads of stuff along the way and hopefully you would inspire others coming out of their imaginary limited shells, educate them, and instil confidence in yourself that you can just do it.
Over to you:
What have you created? and what have you learned from it?
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