the need for perfection was my biggest obstacle

byD Forte

115 followers

12 years ago

I have a problem with wanting everything to be perfect. I refuse to release something to the public until it's 100% ready. That's not always a good thing... recently it's the desire for perfection, and the unquestionable lack thereof, has made itself oh so relevant in my life. One instance is in how my engagement went down. The other is right here - the reason it's taken me almost two months to Take Action here at Wealthy Affiliate.

In WA's Getting Started Lesson 4, you get walked through how to get a quick and dirty website up and running... well that wasn't good enough for me. I've worked on my company's website a bit so I felt that I knew how to make a pretty website. I didn't want to build this website on a plain "blog". Well it turns out that it takes a lot more than simply installing a premium theme. For example - the home page of this theme is very reliant on Featured Images and if they aren't sized just right then the whole homepage gets goofy. What's more, unless you add a separate HEADER image for the page itself, it uses a stretched version of the featured image. And well, that's just not gonna fly. Luckily the support team at Elegant Themes is super responsive - see my review here. See what I mean, all this superficial stuff kept me from diving in.

So it got put off until I found a decent theme that I could work with. Put it off so far that I let my Starter Membership expire and I couldn't even use my blog and participate in the discussions. Until finally I sucked it up and went for it. Beside, when I have some skin in the game I'm much more accountable.

Tonight, my goal is to fix the featured images so they line up properly on the home page. Shouldn't be too much of a challenge, but we'll see.

In the future I plan to take some online classes that teach the basics of HTML, web design and image manipulation so I can efficiently edit at my will. I really enjoy this part of the web stuff.. the first time I successfully edited a .php file in notepad was incredible! Unfortunately it took 100 tries and just as many hours watching tutorials on youtube. That's a 'side-goal' in my bigger plan for personal success.

Signing off,
-d