Ethan Marcotte just redesigned his website and wrote about how the process was a distraction from the difficult things that are going on right now. Adding new features to your blog or your portfolio, tidying up performance issues, and improving things bit by bit can certainly relieve a lot of stress. Also? It’s fun!
What about adding a dark mode to our websites? Or playing around with Next.js? How about finally updating to that static site generator we’ve always wanted to experiment with? Or perhaps we could make the background color of our website animate slowly over time, like Robin’s? Or what about rolling up our sleeves and making a buck wild animation like the one on Sarah’s homepage?
Not so long ago, I felt a bout of intense anxiety hit me out of nowhere and I wound up updating my own website — it was nothing short of relaxing, like going to the spa for a day. I suddenly realized that I could just throw all that stress at my website and do something half-useful in the process. One evening I sat down to focus on my Lighthouse score, the next day was all about fonts, and after that I made a bunch of commits to update the layouts on my site.
This isn’t about being productive right now — it’s barely possible to focus on anything for me with the state of things. And also I’m certainly not trying to guilt trip anyone into cranking out more websites. We all need to take a breath and take each day at a time.
But! If treating your website like a worry stone can help, then I think it’s time to roll up our sleeves and make something weird for ourselves.
Hard agree. I was partly inspired by what Ethan was talking about to re-build my own site over the past week or so. It’s been nice to have something to… not focus on, because focus is hard to come by these days, but to tinker with. Not something with sprints and issues and deadlines, but a quiet project you can whittle away at.