semiBad.

Oh, hello

blog Wednesday 25th of June, 2008

Writing a 'welcome' post is the same as writing the introduction to anything else — fucking difficult. Starting an essay in school or college is exactly the same. Write a sentence, realise it's terrible, hold down backspace until you're back to square one. Repeat.

There are, of course, several major differences between a welcome post on a new site, and a college essay. For one thing, when I wrote my dissertation, I knew that at least one person was going to read it. More importantly, I didn't even think about the introduction until I was at least halfway through the body of the text. An essay is presented fully formed, refined out of sight over a period of time. To some extent, the same is true of this site — this is the third redesign of semiBad, but the first to be released for public display. I even managed to avoid starting at the beginning when it came to the content.

The whole thing, of course, is a matter of first impressions. When you meet someone for the first time, you get one shot — a moment, then it's over. Over time, you may change that impression, for better or worse. But in a blog entry, the possibilities are endless! You could spend your entire afternoon testing first impressions! You could spend the rest of the day, or weeks — or however long it takes to realise that you're sick of the layout, functionality, and sound of your new site, bin it, and move on to version four.

Matt Brown recently wrote about the difficulties of finding a voice online, more elegantly than I could. The alternative is to just publish, say hello, and accept that you might have some work to do changing people's impressions later.

Hello, I'm Andi. Welcome to semiBad.

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