When I decided to switch from the free blogging platform wordpress.com to the more do-it-yourself wordpress.org, I approached it as a challenge to move up. This time I’d put more effort into layout and design. This time I’d make sure it didn’t look like ‘just another wordpress site.’ This time it would all be different. It would all be better.

However when it comes to design, I fall into that unhappy lot Ira Glass described in his now famous quote about beginners. I’m just good enough to recognize that I’m not very good at it. I don’t have any specific need to get better since website design is not my passion, but the unintended side effect is that I hate every design I create within 18 hours of its birth. When I was rebuilding this blog using wordpress.org, I went through version after version. I put together my own header images and spent time perfecting my skills with Paintbrush, the free paint program for Macs. And it was all terrible. I couldn’t stand any of it. I wanted to give up. Before me were hours of hating every site I ever made.

All I wanted to do was write.

That’s when I happened upon a great article on John Scalzi’s blog Whatever. I’ve never read any of John Scalzi’s books, but I know his name and something of his credentials. I knew he had an award-winning blog but I’d never seen it before.

And if John Scalzi can win a Hugo running the WordPress 2013 Default Theme, I think I can move forward with this blog no matter what it looks like.