Updating my site

The tedious work of updating my site is coming together. You know, I had all of this in place. In fact, it was nice before. I am not thinking it’s not nice now, but it is different.

I decided that I wanted my site to be simpler. I am not sure if this is a design trend, but simplicity really is my trend for this year. I am minimizing the books I have, the paper I collect, and the silverware in my house. Everything is just getting smaller and smaller, and I appreciate the difference a lot.

I previously used an automatic website builder, because it made things very easy. But I had little control over the innovations I wanted to add. I work on chatbots, and no, not ChatGPT. I have been working on others for a few years now, and I wanted to see that in action here. It was impossible to add different parts to the previous site. I also found it clunky.

I believe too many pages are unnecessary at times. I really like simplicity. It is more about simplicity than minimalism for me. I conduct user research all the time and analyze things all the time. This means daily. And I have mentioned that simplicity is a researcher’s BFF. There is nothing like simple, clean, and very clear findings to help others understand.

I do not find this needs to work at the expense of design, though. Not one bit! Design is one animal. Research is another. Simplicity should exist in both. They work differently. They exist in different universes so to speak. There is no need to bring one into the process of the other. I do believe, though, that one does learn from the other to make it better. I believe this is a reciprocal process where each gets better with time, based on a mutually beneficial relationship.

And so, I have decided to keep this new design for the site. I need it clean. Did you know that we manifest our anxieties, frustrations, and pain points based on our environments? I think we forget that. Keep your areas of work, play, and existence, clear of frustrations. That was my imbalanced reality with my previous design. No freedom. A lack of freedom means a lack of movement, too. Keep your experiences flowing. Structures are strongest when they are held together by a keystone, and not when they are static from the ground up. And there is a little bit of architectural theory for the day! It’s physics, too. <3