On moving my website to Squarespace
I’ve had my website (very gratefully) hosted by my brother Gareth since I first registered adammorrisdesign.com in 2007. It’s always served as my portfolio site — from when I was a fresh faced design student through to it’s present form. But out of the blue I received an email from Gareth a month or so ago. The gist of which was:
“I am going to be shutting down and stopping providing hosting services — your site will be decommissioned imminently”
When I first set up my site in 2007, I used it as a way to learn more about HTML and designing for the web. But I am painfully slow at coding and haven’t got any better over the years. With that, I ended up having version 1 live for about 5 years and the version after that for 3 more years.
Which is a little embarrassing.
I love the endless possibilities that the web and digital offers. But when designing and building my own website, I found these possibilities stifling. My coding skills (or lack there of) frustrated me. I ended up procrastinating and putting re-design after re-design off. All in the knowledge that my site was sitting there, getting terribly outdated and left to gather dust.
With Gareth’s email in my inbox, I suddenly had the motivation to finally sort my crusty old website out. Maybe I panicked at the thought of having to dive into HTML, CSS, FTPs and the like to design and build my own site again (It’s really not where my strengths lie). So instead I’ve decided to use Squarespace to create my website.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my time is better spent on crafting the content, rather than the wrapper.
I know as a designer of digital things, I’m not utilising my visual design skills by basing this new design off a template. But I can’t say many designers websites are that visually distinct anyway. For me, the gains of having a malleable tool like Squarespace affords me more time. More time to pause and think about how I want to talk about myself. More time to tryout different ways to display my work. More time to easily update the layout to adapt to new and changing content. I’m keen to see where this little experiment in my corner of the web will take me.
So at the moment, adammorrisdesign.com doesn’t look that different from the last version. But it feels pretty different to me.
Adam is a Product Designer at Made by Many in London.
