digital

As I hope I’ve made fairly clear, this blog isn’t designed to offer you a host of life changing hair and beauty tips.

I build websites for a living. I offer other digital services too, but the majority of the day job is building websites for people. I retrained as a mature student a few years ago and quickly discovered that learning web development is a process that never ends. You don’t start with a list of things and when you’ve learnt them all you’re done. The things on the list change and there are always new things being invented and developed and therefore there are new items being added to the list. If you want to stay up to date you have to continually keep working. It’s a little like trying to tidy your house whilst throwing a massive house party.

I don’t believe in experimenting with the work that I do for clients and I just can’t bring myself to spend hours building imaginary websites, so the best solution appeared to be that I should create real sites that I could be creative with. Since joining the digital industry I have invested in an assortment of different tools, some I feel I’ve mastered, some were a waste of time, money and energy and have already been abandoned. There are others that I use on a regular basis without fully utilising all their capabilities. The Adobe Creative Suite falls into this bracket. Like most people I prefer to do things I’m already good at, but if you want to get good at something you have to work at it. I’m finally at a stage with the Pen Tool where I’m winning most of the time but I wanted to get better so I’ve personally created all the artwork for Suburban Afro. It’s tempting to stick to doing things you’re already quite good at but if you want to get better then you need to put the hours in, work a bit harder and show the world what you’ve been doing. Suburban Afro is a chance for me to do all that and it also gives me the chance to get all my hair complaints off my chest as a bonus.

I’m getting new ideas all the time and noticing little things on the site that I need to tweak. The look of the site will change a little over time as I adapt things but primarily it’s about experimentation. I used this blog to test things, such as uploading a site I’ve built locally, instead of always working on live installations hidden with plugins. None of these things are particularly big, but they might have been if they’d gone wrong with a client site during an installation. I’m a massive fan of WordPress but I’ve barely touched the surface so far so I’m looking forward to getting my hands dirty and doing more with it.

I have a notebook full of half written blog posts which will go live over the next few weeks and I’ll continue to work on the WordPress theme. This blog is primarily an opportunity for me to develop my digital skills but the relationship I have with my hair will always provide me with content.