Where Do You Experiment and Learn?

​ ​ ​ ​ Hello Indiana, I was recently boring my teenage child with stories of the early days of the web. It ended with me waxing lyrical about an early personal site I had on Geocities. As my child's eyes glazed over and they wandered away, I found myself searching through archives of Geocities to see if the site still existed. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it, but it left me feeling nostalgic for the site and the time I spent working on it. I have always had a personal site, and I have always 'wasted' time 'tinkering' with it 'needlessly'. However, increasingly I feel like a dinosaur for doing so. It seems few people have a personal site anymore, and even if they do, they rarely 'play' with it. After all, why have a website when you can blog on Medium, post to Twitter or upload to YouTube? Why build something yourself when others have done all the hard work for you? Well, a dinosaur I maybe, but I maintain having a personal website is nearly essential for any digital professional, and I will give you three good reasons why; starting with using it as a place to develop new techniques. Develop New Techniques From techniques I read about online to crazy ideas that pop into my head, my website is a great place to try out new approaches with no interference and minimal consequences. There are no stakeholders to worry about and no cost if the idea falls flat on its face. My personal website is an ideal place to try different design approaches, explore new coding techniques or understanding what approaches to content work best. Obviously, not all of the techniques that work on my personal website will work elsewhere, but it is a good starting point for trying out new ideas. If you are a coder you can try techniques that maybe are not supported by all browsers, and if you are a designer you can create designs that break conventions of the web. For marketers, project managers, copywriters and others, your website is a chance to share your ideas with your peers to gather their feedback. However, for this latter group in particular your website is a chance to broaden your skillset. Explore New Disciplines When you create your website, you have to do everything. You have to code it, design it, create the content and promote it online. That makes a personal website an ideal tool to learn new skills and better understand the work your colleagues do. For designers, it is a chance to learn to code. For coders, it is a chance to introduce yourself to design. It is an opportunity for all to get better at creating content. Kids at school these days learn how to make a basic website. Can you say the same? So many of us in digital couldn't create one of the most basic building blocks of the modern web without using an off the shelf product or getting the aid of others. How can a project manager manage designers and coders without understanding at least at a basic level what they do? How can a marketer create an effective sales funnel if they do not know the basics of creating one of the fundamental components in that journey? We are all too stuck in our silos, and having a personal website is a way of breaking out of that and to learn through experimentation and creation. But there is one last benefit to having a personal website; it can be used to prove a point. Prove a Point I regularly use my website to experiment and prove to myself (and others) that something works or doesn't. For example, I have used overlays to see whether they really make a big difference to conversion. I have also experimented with counters to see if scarcity actually works. A personal website is a great place for running these kinds of experiments because nobody can stop you! It is a chance to gather evidence about that thing you have been arguing about with clients and stakeholders. Your website gives you a place where you can implement your ideas and show others, rather than simply telling them. It is a chance to prove that your ideas will work. More than a Blog or Resume I cannot help feeling that as the web became commercialised, we all started to feel like every website had to provide business value. So the idea of a personal website fell out of fashion. It seems like the only personal websites that exist anymore are either blogs to promote your 'personal brand' or online resumes. A personal website offers so much more potential than that. I can honestly say that my website has made me better at my job by providing an environment where I can experiment and learn. So I would encourage you to consider creating one if you do not have one already. If you do, set aside a little time each month to play with it and see what happens. You will be amazed at the results. Until next time. ​ ​ ​ If you no longer want to hear from me, I completely understand and you can unsubscribe from all emails here. Alternatively, if you need to update any of the information about yourself you can edit your profile here. ​ ​