Making My Sister, Millie Manning, A New Website
December 23, 2010Today, after some time of procrastination and back and forth and such, my sister and I launched her new website. It’s an update after five years, and she’s happy to turn this new leaf. All her own clean design, so I’m a big fan.
It was a standard WordPress site, with some custom jQuery built in and a few plug-ins, but it got me thinking about making sites and how fluid they are.
Most discussions about web development with people outside of the web development world eventually makes it to the subject of “getting it right.” I’m quite the stickler about a fair amount of stuff, but the same time, I can easily let things go when I feel they aren’t the most important at the time. One of the things that Millie understood immediately was that she will be able to constantly update, improve and change her site. There is no “done.”
When someone writes a newspaper article, a book or a song, they’re done. Sure, there can be multiple editions, rewrites, or versions. Even after the first time they release, they can put out another version or correction of some kind. That new version, remix or correction is not what people will remember. It’s that first version that sticks with people.
However, with websites, people remember the url. They’ll go back to that url, and if there are updates, then that’s totally fine, even expected in many cases. Websites are always updated, there are always new versions. It makes websites different from many other media, but then again, that’s nothing new – websites have and will always be different from other media.
