Perfect Enemy

Webdesign • Advice • Front-End

Jun 12

When good enough is good enough.

I'm writing this later than I had hoped and I’m also very tired. So this blog will be a bit different — don’t worry, people tell me I’m very funny when I’m tired. Less filters.

Earlier this week I launched my new website. I finally left the comfort of the pre-made websites of Squarespace and ventured into the wilder terrain of GitHub pages. Wild for me — developers should be very comfortable with these waters. I’m looking at you, staff engineers in my life.

My website took weeks of work — two weeks of solid working on designing a new landing page and porting 25+ pages — and before this, one week of work doing some necromancy on my GitHub account and oiling up my rusty CSS, HTML and JavaScript skills.

Did I have to go all into the wilderness and start coding again? Not really. I could have stayed in Squarespace. My website seemed okay, and the content management system was pretty good, but it was time to move (here’s my detailed reasoning).

I could have also learned how to use Webflow, but after a few hours of testing it out, it wasn’t for me. It’s a good in-between coding and design, but I used to earn my bread making websites (read about that chapter of my life here), and Webflow just seemed like it had too many little windows and settings. I might as well just use CSS.

Why did I end up redoing my website? You ask my sleepy face. Short answer: it needed to be perfect.
Long answer: it needed to be perfect → better. Let me elaborate.

As a designer, your portfolio is your introduction. It should be close to perfect. Heaven-sent. Crafted by angels pixel by pixel. Your work and your life summarized for people who are not willing to spend more than 10 seconds on you. It’s rough. You need tough skin and a lot of self-reflection. You need to look at your darling work and ask yourself: is it good enough?

My website didn’t showcase my projects in the best way possible. I felt it didn’t show my senior level. Ouch. Ah, but now you worked for two weeks and it’s perfect, right? Lord, no. It’s better, but I had to make peace with the “perfect” enemy.

I like to pride myself as a very pragmatic person. I love when things look perfect to me, but through experience I’ve learned that when you need to deliver, you just need to have something okay for the deadline.

It’s better than having nothing. I could have spent two more weeks perfecting things, but if you think about it in business terms, that’s two weeks you don’t have clients. Especially with something fairly easy to update like my personal website, it was better to start making some noise than silently working away on my magnum opus.

Here is my 4-point strategy to wave the white flag to “perfect” and shake hands with “good enough”:

Hey! It's my new website :)

1. Make a list

Love me a good list. Yum.

Write down what is essential — what has to be there, absolutely no exceptions. For me it was:

  • A better menu (check)
  • A good landing page that showcased star projects and blog (check)
  • The website should have all my pages with the new styling (check)

Then I write the nice-to-haves and things for future releases. Version 2 should have better documentation and better images, show more of the process of how I got to a design. Version 3 can have better interactions and little design details: progress bars, scrollytelling sections.

Review your list and be honest — be brutally honest. Did anything from the nice-to-haves make its way to the essentials? Pretend you are making a cake for your friends. If you have at least the base, people will eat. Add the frosting and cherries when you made sure you have something.

2. Be strategic

Before I started porting all the pages, I had to make sure my structure wouldn’t mean extra work down the line. If I was moving 18 blog pages, I better not multiply a mistake. I defined a good naming system that would work for all images, standardized file names and locations, and set the menu and footer to be loaded from separate HTML files.

This way, if I needed to update either, I just had to do it in one location . Spending a bit of extra time thinking about where to avoid redundancies helped a lot to save future me precious time .

Thanks, past me!

3. Negotiate

Even when you made a pretty good list and you planned your workflow strategically, you will most likely find yourself noticing things take longer than anticipated. More things will pop up as you work. If this has never happened to you, I don’t believe you. Go somewhere else for advice, you’re already perfect. Maybe write your own blog.

Keep reading if you are like me and have found unexpected things along your process. Oops. What do we do then? We negotiate.

Listen, I have to do x, y, z extra — this is either going to take more time or we make some compromises. In my case, I just had to convince myself that perfect wasn’t worth it. Do you want to spend another 5 hours making this transition work or do you want to publish now? Looking at the dark circles under my eyes in the mirror, it was very easy to agree on leaving the fancy JavaScript for version 2. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of done.

4. Ask for help

There might be shortcuts to what you are doing. Tools you don’t know that can make you 10 times faster.

Here I want to give a special shoutout to my favorite engineer. Instead of waiting 3+ minutes to see how my CSS would look once I uploaded to GitHub — yes, I was basically using a rock to crack a nut, like a crow that’s just discovering tools — I started using Zed and running my pages on a local host. My updating speed became insane. Like the crow now had a gun. Amazing.

Do a quick search online or ask your peers what tools they use to do similar projects. The learning curve might be a bit steep, but then you will be zooming downhill. Like a crow.(?)

This has nothing to do with being perfect, I'm just drinking matcha right now. Yum.

That’s my advice! Now, if you want a soundtrack while you work on your project and it’s time to fight “perfect,” I can recommend Enemy from Imagine Dragons. Yes, I watched Arcane very recently and got completely obsessed with it.

Keep checking your list and revisiting your strategy periodically. Things can change on a day-to-day basis, but being pragmatic will keep you sane.

Like Imagine Dragons say: “Look out for yourself.” Don’t let perfect beat you.

That’s Enough About Me!

What do you think? What should I focus on next?

Are you working on a long-term project? Are you dealing with tight deadlines? Did you find the crow with a gun metaphor funny? I did.

Let me know—shoot me an email! 😊
📩 sifuentesanita@gmail.com