SOME RANDOM DUDE

This post will have been the 8th blog entry in two months. To put that into perspective, in the month of March 2007 this blog had 34 posts alone. Frankly, this is not surprising - updates have slowly trickled downward for the past 3 or 4 months now. There are a few reasons for this - which I can get into in a later post. However, it has been clear that the current model of how I have blogging up to this point on Some Random Dude is not sustainable, nor is it smart. The effort/reward ratio is just not high enough - and while I was willing and able to a year ago, I am no longer.

The thing that has gotten to me the most is the amount of manual labor it takes to publish frequently. I would post 3 or 4 times a week and the traffic would frankly not reflect what I think it should have. Make no mistake, I am not in the camp that believes traffic is the sole measure of success and value - however, it is important. About one year ago, I started setting goals for what I would like to achieve with this blog - goals that I concluded would only be possible with a relatively high frequency of postings. That notion then put me into the pattern of regular weekly posts which became more of a chore than it should have been. I do not think that there’s no coincidence between the fact that some of my most popular posts were written before I started posting weekly content. In retrospect, I sold-out quality for quantity and I am kicking myself now for that.

For a long time now, I have believed that the most important piece for nearly any web project is the owner-facing CMS. It does not matter how well-implemented the user-facing features are or how strongly-executed the visual design is - if the people running the website cannot easily and conveniently make updates and fresh content, the site (as a whole) is lacking. Honestly, this opinion has been greatly influenced through my experience with this site. I find doing nearly anything outside of the normal tasks almost impossible. Unfortunately, sometimes even the normal tasks seem impossible as well. And it is 100% my fault.

I have never been completely happy with the execution of Some Random Dude. To be honest, I rushed it. Before the redesign, site was in wretched shape (visually), I wanted to improve it quickly and I was not willing (or able) to devote much time into it. For the amount of hours I spent in the redesign, I feel like it has provided generously - but it just was never all the way there. Instead of creating a design concept/plan and then making the effort to push one unified production solution, I would address ideas and problems as they came. We all know that is a recipe for headaches. I admit, my notion of what I wanted from a blog at the time of the last design was vague at best. In fact, going through this very process has helped all my ideas and concepts gel. Now it is about time to act on them.

So, for the past month or so, I have been writing down ideas, sketching out concepts and just thinking about how I could making blogging fun again. For the past week, I have begun to act on those ideas and it has been extremely exciting. To do a simple redesign would be a complete waste of time - instead, this is a ground-up rehaul with new structure, new features, new categories and much more focus. Most importantly, my goal is to make the creation of content simpler so that the process is more about creating and less about publishing. This go-around, however, I am not concerned about when it gets done, but I am very concerned about how it gets done. I guess that is a roundabout way of saying that the new blog will be done when it will be done. I will be attempting to write about in more detail just what I do not like about Some Random Dude at this point and how I think it can be improved.

So do not expect many posts in the upcoming weeks or months. I am going to be busy.blog, blogging, cms, goals, redesign, some random dude traffic