It’s 2022 and here I am re-making my portfolio again. Not to get a new job, but to try out the latest WordPress block editor and theme. It’s great. I love it so far. I’m a nerd now.

I’m a little older and (I like to think) a little wiser than last time I posted. Almost everything I made and put it my portfolio nearly four years ago is gone and dusted. Off the web. Kaput. It got me thinking about the transience of the web, and web design in particular.

Do you remember Geocities? Angelfire? Peperidge Farm does I do.

I remember “hacking” and finagling CSS and absolute positioning in MySpace to get the music player to look juuust right. I was also spending all my time in my high school Visual Basic class coloring the interface, so in retrospect it was inevitable that I would become a UX designer. The web has to work well and look good!

(Okay it doesn’t have to, but we can’t all be Craigslist or Berkshire Hathaway, now can we?)

None of that is around anymore. I couldn’t find my own GeoCities page if I tried. Nor could I find my old band’s MySpace page. That’s probably a good thing on both counts.

In fact, all of my old work at Resultco is gone now too. So are most of the developers I worked with and learned so much from as well. And that was only like, what, five years ago? I hope we all moved on to bigger and better things. All I’ve seen from couple of them seems to confirm that.

But like I said, it’s all gone. All I have are a handful of screenshots that have gotten processed over and over. No live links. All my websites are disappearing from their family pictures…

And at first I found this kind of discouraging. I still might, honestly.

But then again, maybe, it can be hopeful. The loop is coming around on itself faster and faster these days, websites only last about five years if you build them well. Then you build up tech debt and notice new patterns amongst your users and admins and eventually you just need to clean the whole thing up and start fresh. Just like fashion, styles only last so long on the web. But that means I get to keep moving forward as a designer and developer. I always have a good excuse to work with the latest and greatest toys and tools of the web, because there’s always someone out there with a site that they need redesigned or overhauled. Sometimes I’m even around on the team for a couple rounds of redesigns. That’s always a fun challenge to keep things fresh.

I’ve learned that a website is a living, breathing system that responds and molds to how its used. In one way or another. In an abstract, systematic, meta sense. And that means shedding its skin every now and then as the old one gets worn and weathered and the organism underneath grows larger.

This re-do of my portfolio is only a light one, thankfully. And the new WordPress theme is making this a breeze compared to previous redesigns. I’m thankful for that. There was a time where I would have seen a halfway decent WYSIWYG editor as a threat, but the truth is this: no matter how you build it, someone still needs to design the site.

And I’ll be here to do it.