I recently noticed that I’ve had this WordPress blog for 10 years. A full decade of moaning about my hair on my little development website and it seemed like a good time to reflect and post something.
The main purpose of this website was to give me a place to test things out and practice new skills. I build websites for a living so it’s important that I keep up to date. Obviously I can’t try things out on client sites and I’m notoriously bad at making the time to building pretend websites, so creating a development site made perfect sense. I already have a personal blog so I needed inspiration for a new site that gave me a place to play, but which mattered enough that I wouldn’t just abandon it after a few hours.
Content Inspiration
My relationship with my hair has always been “complicated” and numerous encounters with unprofessional professionals hasn’t helped. All I ever wanted as a little girl was long blonde hair. Unfortunately for little me, my genetics allocated me an afro. I was not impressed, and in the 50 years that followed I have experimented with an assortment of hairstyles to try and avoid my natural hair. I’ve had braids in every colour you can think of, weaves, relaxers and even a curly perm.
I moan about my hair in real life, so it was inevitable that I would eventually start moaning about it online. My hair changes on a regular basis, which means that I always have inspiration of some sort. There is always something to complain about if you put your mind to it! I would like to say that I’ve made peace with the fro and although it is rarely seen, it is appreciated. It’s part of me and without our ups and downs, I wouldn’t have anything to mouth off about.
WordPress
A lot of things have changed in the last ten years, not least of all WordPress, which is the software I built this site with. The most recent update is busily trying to shoehorn in AI features, that I don’t want or need, which is a huge change from how things were back in WordPress Version 4 when I published my first post Hello From The Suburban Afro The functionality has completely changed. Blocks hadn’t been invented and customising a WordPress site without resorting to a page builder plugin wasn’t for novices.
Graphic Design
When I was trying to get the hang of Adobe Illustrator and created the cartoon version of myself, this blog seemed like an obvious place to use it. Blog posts work better with imagery and I’m a big fan of an animated version of myself. The best way to learn new things is to actually try doing them, so I started with Ai tutorials (back when the letters A and I meant Adobe Illustrator and not artificial intelligence) Even the colourful flowers in the background are a result of me learning new things. I’m a web developer, not a graphic designer and although I keep going back to it, illustrator is not for me. I love the idea of it, but I just can’t master the pen tool, which is a pretty big deal! I’m currently playing with Procreate on my iPad, so at some point I will hopefully get good enough to create some assets I like enough to post on here.
Next Steps
Over the last decade I have built a lot of client sites using WordPress and almost every project has a stage where I’m up far too late at night fighting with the code in someone else’s theme, so it’s time to start creating my own. The best time to have started this was ten years ago, the next best time is now! So from time to time this website will look completely different for a very short time whilst I test out my new skills. That’s the whole point of a development site. It’s a safe place to practice and test out new things.
This site definitely deserves a makeover. From a UX point of view it’s not the best, there are things I like about it but the functionality isn’t great and even I can’t find things on here. I’d like to say that I’ll definitely make time to update it, but we both know it probably won’t happen any time soon. I’m lucky enough to be busy with client work and teaching, so this will just have to wait.
My afro definitely has a few more grey hairs than it had in 2016, but I’m ok with that. I’m not interested in pretending to still be in my 20s. Growing old is a privilege. My relationship with my hair has improved over the last decade, but I’m still the Suburban Afro and I’m sure that I can still find plenty of things to say.
Here’s to the next ten years.
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