Taking the first step can be hard. I know (from experience) how difficult it can be to achieve certain goals like building a website. Goals are so much easier said than done. We love to talk about our awesome ideas – and they may truly be awesome ideas – but we constantly make excuses and fail to take actionable, tangible steps to accomplish them. Whether its making excuses, spending time “perfecting” things that aren’t necessary, or generally wasting time, many of us have a tendency to dance around our ideas.
I wanted to write this post to help encourage those of you who may be stuck in a state of “perpetual inaction” as it relates to building a website and finally breathing some life into the ideas you’ve been throwing around your head for who knows how long.
I encourage you to leave comments with any questions and or comments you have so I can constantly improve the quality of these posts! I really appreciate your feedback!
Enjoy.
Remove Limiting Beliefs, Stop Making Excuses
“I don’t have photoshop.”
“I don’t have graphic design skills.”
“I don’t know how to program.”
etc, etc, etc…
You will learn about excellent, free alternatives to photoshop, I’m going to teach you basic graphic design skills that will make you LOOK like a professional, and you don’t need to know how to program to build a professional website. Stop making excuses and get it done.
The Perfection Fallacy
Perfection, as it pertains to web design, is a completely relative and immeasurable unit. Therefore, perfection is impossible to achieve and trying to do so is foolish. Stop trying to perfect the minutiae. If your site is good enough to convey your message, yet you constantly adjust your color scheme or change your logo, you are simply avoiding what actually needs to be done (writing content, creating product, etc…). Practice a “good-enough-and-get-it-done-mentality” and you will be far more productive. Also, remember that you can always go back a tweak things later!
Eliminate Extraneous Time Wasters: How to Find Quality WordPress Themes For Free…The Right Way
Let’s face it, when it comes to general topics like web design, blogging, internet marketing, etc…, we have access to massive amounts of information. Searching for free WordPress themes is no different. If you google “free WordPress themes” you will find pages and pages of “Top 25 Free WordPress Themes of 2012” type listings. Do you think the people that create those lists actually have experience using each theme? Probably not. As a result, many of the themes listed on these “Top 25” lists probably aren’t that great and you end up getting nowhere as you wade through them . For the would-be web designer, all of that time spent aimlessly searching the web is wasted and you start to wonder if you can build a website at all.
There’s a better way… Who would want to give away quality WordPress themes at no cost? Premium WordPress theme companies, of course!. These types of companies (similar to good drug dealers) know that if they can hook you with their product by giving you free samples, they might eventually turn you into a paying customer (if you choose to upgrade, etc…). Finding the best free themes is all about finding the free themes that Premium companies develop.
Do Not Re-Invent The Wheel
Need a color scheme and think you have to use trial and error to find the perfect combination? Wrong. You can wrack your brain for days over a color scheme. One of the best (and most efficient) ways to find a color scheme is to use a site like colourlovers.com. They have hundreds of different color combinations already selected from pre-existing websites, magazines, home decorations, fashion, and more. Just copy the hexcodes and you’re good to go.
Another method (my personal favorite) is to use a Firefox plugin called ColorZilla. This enables you to examine any color on any website by selecting the tool and clicking on the screen. This is my favorite method because it’s so simple and it eliminates ALL of the guesswork. Note: You can’t copyright color schemes, they are completely fair game.
