All original work © Jason W. Wong. Please ask for permission to reproduce any work.

All original work © Jason W. Wong. Please ask for permission to reproduce any work.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Do what's right and you just might win a battle you never fought...

 
 

I realized something in designing my website on Wix recently--the experience was like a lot of my Retrograde projects. A friend asked why I didn't take advantage of my web savvy/designer friends to help me create the website of my dreams. I told him I could help him get the sofa of his dreams for $25,000, but was it worth it for him? (He said no.)

See what I'm saying?

At Retrograde I introduce people to a lot of West Elm, Room & Board, and other reasonably priced, well-designed vendors that aren't terribly exclusive or pricey. At a place like Room & Board, you can choose from dozens of sofas and have them upholstered in close to 300 different fabrics and leathers. That's a lot of choices for most people!

When it came time to finally do my website during my holiday break, I decided to follow a similar route. Wix has a lot of templates (possibly hundreds) in both HTML5 and Flash that can be modified and customized really easily. I know I tried other templates and programs and always got frustrated and tired. (Remember that TWO YEARS ago I promised I was working on it?) It's kind of like why people contact me for help on their homes--because they feel the same frustration and inertia when they're shopping for their homes. Yes, at Ye Olde Dayjobbe I work in a world of customized luxury and design. But we get hung up over perfection at Ye Olde Dayjobbe--for example, the website there has been "under construction" for over four years.

Like our homes, at some point you just have to do it. Bite the bullet. Take the shot. So yeah, I could have pulled some strings, traded services, or flat-out paid a professional web designer to build the site I envisioned two years ago. But instead I decided to do something that worked with my time, budget, schedule, and current lifestyle. Kind of like what I recommend with Retrograde ;-)


No comments: