Website gurus are like the hare in Aesop’s fable of The Tortoise and the Hare. They want you to dive in and start posting within minutes of setting up a website. “Don’t worry about making mistakes,” say they. “You can always fix them later. At the beginning you won’t have that many readers anyway, so it will hardly matter. The important thing is that you just get out there where people can see your stuff.”
Smiling tortoise ~ jturner DigitalSilk© graphic
This probably comes down to personality. I suspect website gurus are
- technophiles, who love technology and don’t mind muddling through it;
- early adopters, who like to be the first to try things out;
- susceptible to FOMO, people who fear someone else will beat them to the prize;
- in other words, hares at heart.
Well, I am a tortoise at heart, a slow learner who likes to think things through before I act. When it came to Anselm’s Quest, it took me more than a year after setting up my website before I posted the first blog entry. Even when I did, my website was cloaked like a Klingon starship, and still is. I don’t plan to launch for another few months at least, and I don’t regret a moment of the delay.
Here are a few things I gained from keeping my website development slow and steady:
- an understanding of how the internet works and what that meant for Anselm’s Quest,
- time to understand and clarify my “why” or purpose in starting a blog,
- time to think about how my website could stand out visually,
- time to develop content and graphic resources without the pressure of a deadline, and
- time to savour the process of learning and creating.
Time figures largely in the life of a tortoise, whereas the hare misses a lot in madly dashing for a destination. I treat my website like the creative enterprise it is, which for me means taking care to get it as right as I can, as near to my vision as possible. This is different from perfectionism. As an artist, I know there is no such thing as perfection in human creation. For the most part, I have learned to recognize the point where creative desire meets negative returns, where more work will take away more than it adds.
The journey is only the reward when we do not move so fast that beauty becomes a blur, the feast is gulped without tasting, friends are met only in passing. Love the inner voice that says, “Move slowly in your purpose, take time to savour and cherish the good, find your own rhythm, learn slowly and well.” And spare a kind thought for the exhausted hares as you pass them on your way.