I’m a designer, developer, entrepreneur, author and photographer based in Seattle, WA. My passion for design comes from the idea that true simplicity can provide the most innovative and usable products & solutions. This is primarily why I left my day job several years ago in order to pursue and create things that I was actually passionate about. Here are some of the things I have been thinking about recently:
Simplicity and minimalism seems to be a growing trend these days, but the concept of “less is more” has always been at the core of everything I do in every aspect of my life ever since I can remember. I’ll spend hours, days, even weeks looking for the perfect solution for any given task in my life, whether it be online or offline. If I can’t find what I’m looking for, I’ll do my best to create it myself which I have been doing more of this year. When it comes to creating and maintaining a website, I’m convinced that there will never be a perfect solution for every single person/project, but there are a few amazing new platforms and solutions out there that have definitely grabbed my attention. Please keep in mind that these are “promising” solutions for simple websites and blogs, many of which are not even available to use yet. Still, I thought I would share what I’ve found over the past few months (these are in no particular order by the way).
Within the first second of making eye contact for the first time with my baby girl, nothing else in this world mattered. Behind a flood of tears and pure joy, I can honestly say that my mind had never been more clear. For a brief moment, the stress and clutter of thought regarding my daily routine of business and life in general was nonexistent. The only thing that mattered was the reality of this amazing new part of my family, a miracle like no other in all sense of word. All of the sudden, I realized from that point forward, I wanted to try and integrate a little more balance in my life, a little more time to enjoy the little things every single day with my new family and a little less time to worry about everything and everyone else.
One of the reasons I left my day job was so that I could create and work on things I was actually passionate about. The WordPress website publishing platform allowed me to do that in the form of WordPress themes for around the first 3 years (starting in 2008), but not so much in recent years. Minimalism and simplicity have always been at the core of anything I create, but WordPress has evolved into something much more complex and is no longer conducive to those values as I’ve written about in previous posts. My theme business was built on WordPress and that’s not something I can ignore since it still allows me to pay the bills, but I feel a fresh start is necessary in order to provide value to the web as well as to enjoy what I’m working on once again. With that in mind, one of my primary goals this year was to stop complaining about my personal issues with existing website solutions and start creating new solutions either on my own or by collaborating with other like-minded people. Here’s what I have to show for this goal so far:
The WordPress publishing platform has become very powerful tool for creating virtually any type of website. It has enabled anyone with a little time and savviness to obtain hosting, install the platform, choose from the thousands of themes available today and then configure and launch a website with endless content and features in the form of theme options, plugins and widgets. Awesome, right? I wholeheartedly disagree, and here’s why. Creating a beautiful, effective and efficient website is an art — a delicate mix of structure, design and content. You might think you know what’s best for your own website, but unless you have the talent and know-how to create the “delicate mix” of these things, you probably don’t and you shouldn’t assume that you do. WordPress (including frameworks, themes and plugins) allows anyone to make and act on that assumption very easily which is a problem in my opinion and potentially injustice to an art form.
After just twelve years of life on this earth, our beloved black lab “Molly” had to be put to rest recently. She was not just a Dog to us, as I’m sure your dog is not just a dog to you. She filled our days with smiles and I truly hope that we did the same for her. I’m not going to get into why we had to let her pass on because that’s besides the point, and I realize it’s just the cycle of life, but there’s something so saddening about a dog in pain. Unlike people, they don’t understand why they hurt or why they can’t play fetch or go for a run today. They truly do spend their entire lives just wanting to be loved, just wanting to be happy, just wanting to be accepted by us and absolutely nothing more, even in their last moments on earth.
The WordPress website publishing platform has been a huge and integral part of my life for the last 5+ years. It provided me with the motivation to leave my day job back in 2008 and the means to launch and maintain a successful WordPress theme business from 2008 to now. I am incredibly thankful that I’ve had the opportunity to expand my reach beyond the walls of a tiny cubicle and get a very small taste of what it means to be a founder of something unique and creative. Lately, however, I’ve been wondering about the next 5+ years of my professional career.
I launched Press75.com (my WordPress theme business) four and a half years, seven versions and about 30 themes ago with the hope that I could make a living doing something I truly enjoyed. I can say without a doubt that this has been a great adventure, even with all of the “ups” and “downs” (there have been many). There were several things I could have or maybe even should have done differently, but either way, I consider Press75 to be a success.
In general when someone purchases or downloads a WordPress theme these days, there is this expectation that it will support all of the functionality WordPress provides, that it will be “customizable” from top-to-bottom and that it will work with any one of the 20,000+ plugins available in the plugin directory. We have fed those expectations by developing complex theme frameworks, endless theme options, shortcodes, metaboxes, etc. which has lead to an unsettling commonality in the majority of all new themes released by any theme provider today.
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