I am doing a periodic kick of my awareness of things outside software development by reading the 20th Anniversary edition of Positioning: The Battle for your Mind.
Whilst I haven’t finished the book, just the first few chapters were very helpful in coming up with the content for the flyer I provided for the goody bags at the ACS WA Branch State Conference this week, one of the benefits of being a speaker.
On my not-quite-linearly-growing list of things to do are various items to do with blog and website appearance updates. But, does it really matter?
In particular, does having a standard RapidWeaver theme and complementary standard WordPress theme on my site and this blog make me look like:
- a highly-focused individual who doesn’t waste time on non-essentials
- an undistinguished member of a horde of bloggers
- too cheap or busy to find someone to take care of appearances
- still bearing scars from the last time I handed over site production (Ohhh the FrontPage97 horrors!)
- a procrastinator who knows enough CSS to make a difference to his site and likes to think he could and should do it himself as a skill refresher but hasn’t got around to it
- any and all of the above?
Above all, in the few seconds of eyeballs I grab from someone who isn’t coming here for the deathless prose or matchless technical content (cough!), are they going to notice the design?
1, but maybe a little too much.
I’m a fan of clean and simple (gee, I wonder where I picked that up), but a little graphical context here and there wouldn’t hurt.