So, in a follow-up to my previous blog entry, I’m still journaling for the mental health benefits, and today I want to discuss my experience with building my blog site using WordPress. I’ve titled this post “The Dunning-Kruger Effect” after the famous psychological study that highlights how individuals with the least experience tend to overestimate their performance.
Initially, I mentioned that building a functional website was relatively easy and that anyone could create one in roughly two hours. I’d like to amend that statement: Activating a working website is relatively easy. Building a nice website is a whole other matter.
Even with user-friendly software like WordPress, designing and building your personal website can be time-consuming for beginners. I’ve encountered some challenges like ensuring the site looks good on all popular internet browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc.) and making the site compatible with various devices (desktops, tablets, mobile devices, etc.).
While building my site, I realized that it’s not enough to design a website that looks good on only one browser or device. For instance, my homepage title displayed correctly in Firefox but was unreadable in Chrome. Similarly, when I visited TomRafels.com on Kristin’s iPhone, none of my photos showed up correctly, and my text ran off the page. It’s essential to make smart design choices and plan things out for compatibility with all devices and browsers.
I have a lot of work left to do on this project, and I want to make building my website an enjoyable learning experience rather than a monotonous chore. I’m going to give myself more time to finish building it the way I like and try not to rush the process. In the end, I’m confident that my website will be something I can be proud of.
Still, I do have to pat myself on the back and say how impressed I am with how far I’ve come in building this blog site. I never thought this was something that I could actually do or that it might be something I would enjoy doing. This has me thinking about other projects I should try out or that I’d like to pursue. To that end, I think I need to explore goal setting as a way to challenge myself and grow in different areas of life.
Goal setting could be an excellent way to incorporate some structure into my journaling and help me maintain focus on self-improvement. By setting specific, achievable targets, I could see tangible progress and stay motivated to continue my journey. In my next journal entry, I plan to dive into various aspects of goal setting and why it’s a good thing to practice. I’m excited to see where this new approach will take me and how it will shape my journaling experience.
-Tom