With much appreciation to Jesse Anderson at Zoubakin Strategic Creative I now have my own website.
I must say the whole process of pulling it together is very cool. You start with that paralysing anxiety that comes from having far too many options, then start whittling away ideas until the eventual product is revealed. It made me surprisingly nervous. I’ve worked with agencies before, but never on something as personal as a site with my name on it. Jesse would call me on Skype, suggest a bit of this and a bit of that, I would fearfully add content, and then we’d review and re-tweak.
The moment I felt I had something I would be proud of? It was when when he uploaded the masthead typeface and the seagull logo. I’d been making vague noises about animals, or a nature-y theme to the site, and then – wham – Jess hit me with a YouTube link to a cheese-o-rama Neil Diamond song about Jonathon Livingston Seagull, and the bird just coasted from one Firefox tab to another and came to roost on my page (this is a known security flaw with Firefox when working on creative projects). The exact moment when I knew it was exactly what I wanted was when I clicked on the gull, dragged him a little to the left then released the mouse and found that some quirk of the software makes him fly gracefully back to his first position.
Sold, to the man with the seagull logo.
So anyway, what will this site be about? Principally, it’s a place for my freelance writing portfolio – an online cv to help in the constant hunt for the copywriting and journalistic work that’s currently keeping the wolf from the door. But also a place for me to rabbit on (what’s with the mixed menagerie of animal metaphors?) about whatever comes to mind. My couple of years writing the About Town column and the short time I spent blogging for Stuff’s Blog Idol 2 competition made me realise how much I like putting ideas into a structure that other people can – hopefully – enjoy. And I’ve found that the more you do, the more you can do – so that a regular bit of blathering about any-old-thing makes you more creative and more productive.
So. Onwards. And if you ever want a site built – or, I gather, any other creative development work done – I thorougly recommend Zoubakin.
