Let me tell you a secret. I've been ashamed. Deeply ashamed to promote my website in case someone I really admire, well, or really, anyone who knows the difference between good web design and bad design, comes to my site and say "oh that Jen girl, she's really not any good. She thinks she is, but she's just mediocre." Ok, maybe no one would actually think that… but they would not be impressed. They would not be bowled over. They would not think I'm awesome. And I want to be awesome. Really awesome. Who knows exactly why. But secretly, I do.

I don't mind revealing my limitations, or the places where I can learn more. (There are plenty.) But I do mind knowing that I have chops which people don't see. And I've had incredibly high ideas of what I could/should/would do with this jensimmons.com space. I was painfully aware that I have been falling far short of that perfectionist ideal for a long time.

So what to do? For months (like a year), I've been thinking: I have to get to working on my website. I just need to try harder. I need to push myself more. I need to prioritize. Be more disciplined. Just do it… But that wasn't enough apparently. Is that really what I needed?

Perfectionism is a funny thing. It eats up so much time. Perfectionism is some kind of weird black hole where energy, ideas, and effort get sucked into a different time-space continuum. #fail #recursive

What I noticed a couple weeks ago is that I was still a long, long way away from being able to launch anything new. Even with all the ideas in my head and all my skills and experience, I was on a trajectory that would launch My New Awesome Site sometime in third quarter 2011. If then.

And mostly I noticed the fear behind the perfectionism. Month before last, Jeffrey Zeldman* finally heard of me! He met me! He invited me to be on his podcast (episode 35)! And (I assume) he even went to my website. And it sucked. It was already happening — the missed opportunity. I wasn't awesome enough yet. I wasn't ready.

So I decided to do whatever I could to break out of the deadlock. What if the worst I feared happened? What if The (literally) Best Web Designers In The World went to my website, and it totally sucked. Not just in the 2010 maybe-being-too-hard-on-myself/holding-myself-to-a-very-high-standard kind of way, but actually really did suck?

That makes me laugh. That is a thing we can all related to. That is something interesting — far more interesting than being stuck in a boring cycle of not getting something done.

So here we go. I'm going to launch this website ugly. I'm going to launch it unfinished. It's going to actually suck for a while.

It's an agile principle — figure out what's the most minimal feature set you can possibly tolerate, and ship that. Then iterate. Launch over and over.

So for the last several weeks, that's been my focus. Just launch whatever crappy thing I can. Now, instead of a certain level of quality being the metric, a certain level of continually speed is what's important. I feel a need to do something, anything, soon. People are watching, but I've changed the game. They want to see My Ugly Website, and they want to see it change each day. Those people are you. And that is such an incredibly helpful feeling. Thank you. Maybe you think this is dumb. Actually, that's honestly ok. Feel free. Meanwhile I'm going to hang out with the people who know exactly what I'm talking about, who also have perfectionist genes, and who aren't shipping either. For ya'll, I launch this not done website.

In these last several weeks, I've upgraded to the new version of Drupal, rearchitected the content, edited some of the old content to be better (still working on that). I've moved servers, setup Git (twice, once on each server environment), learned a ton about the new tools (including how to upgrade a Drupal module that needed upgrading), and gotten to a place where I feel like this is the "most minimal". It looks like crap in places. It reads like crap in places. What I want you to expect is not that there are no crappy parts, but that this will change. Often. That you can come back over and over and watch things change.

So here is my roadmap:

1. Get this online. As I write this, this task is not done. But if you can read this, you'll know I've checked number one off my list.
2. Write the layout, the CSS media queries and such to make a good layout for multiple devices and experiences.
3. Make great typography. Make it easy and pleasant to read.
4. Setup an RSS feed and such things a that good website should have.
5. Improve the UI, IA, UX, and XYZ to present content to you in great ways.
6. Write write write. Really, this is most important. Start writing the articles for which I have tons of notes scattered around my apartment. Get the words on the page. And publish often.
7. Add visual style and branding to give the impression I want to give this season, while making it easy to change this layer later.
8. Setup media for real — html5 video and audio. And set up a system for making that easier in the future.
9. Go through the markup more than I have so far, and adjust the HTML to be the best it can be, with correct HTML5 outlining and such.

I think that's it. I reserve the right to not do that list in that order — to do things as they come. I hope to not have to mess with the servers and such much more. I want to focus on design and content. And on you.

I hope you find this interesting. Maybe. Maybe not. If you do, come back. Comment below. I'd love to hear other people's stories of how you stop yourself from doing something that you want to do, that you know you can do well. Or maybe you aren't stopping yourself, you just aren't finishing, or starting.

*dear Jeffrey, you know I'm not really talking about you the person. You and I, The People have barely met. I mean You, The Icon. Not really you, but what you represent in the arc of my career. The Icon who wrote the book which set the last decade of my life in motion. The Icon with which, finally, after so many thousands of hours of coding and learning and striving, I crossed paths. I hope someday the person of me and can meet the person of you. Meanwhile, the Icon of you fits well into this story I'm telling. So thanks for lending me your Icon-ness.