A Hint of Green Leaves
Each day the leaves pop out a bit more. Our back yard has that special spring green haze from all of the leaves popping out. It feels as if the energy of life is just bursting everywhere.
Change is in the air
Green!
Along with the trees and plants that are coming back to life in the Minnesota springtime, my website is undergoing a make-over.
Rethinking my design and purpose from the ground up has been challenging and fun.
I have been thinking about making changes for months but the ideas never quite gelled. I wanted to try to do the re-design without making a test design that needed to be moved (with all of the difficulties of making sure all the links still worked after the move).
Quote of the day: “Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Then, last week, my web host updated the PHP version on the server and suddenly I had a PHP warning appearing on my site. Several subtle issues stemmed from this warning. After taking a look at the offending code I decided that I’d rather spend my time implementing the changes I’d been considering rather than debugging and fixing.
Time for Change
And then I decided to go ahead and make a leap of faith and start the re-design on my live site, knowing that things would be messy and confusing for a few hours (hopefully, not for days).
For a day or more the site was a mess. It took me a while to figure out how to get the new theme I chose with a static front page working the way I wanted it to.
I had several frustrating do-overs where I ended up resetting everything to default settings and then starting over from scratch again. Each time I learned something and gained more clarity.
Finding the right photos to work on the front page was challenging. I tried several different photos before I came up with a set that I liked. And I still have one or two I plan to update.
Getting Clear
The best part about re-designing is the thought process it demands. I started with 6 major call-outs on the front page but quickly realized two things:
- Too much information is confusing.
- I need to be clear about what my priorities are.
The great thing about creating and maintaining a website is the clarity it gives me about what matters to me in my business and my life. All of me gets expressed, and what I do needs to work for the peculiar health challenges that I’ve worked with for years.
Living with the seasons in Minnesota is good practice for working with ebbs and flows of my health challenges. With the weather, I always seem to know what I want it to be like, but then I need to learn to thrive with what it really is like, especially through the long Minnesota winters.
With my body there is what I want to do, and then there is the need to step back and consider what my body is able to do and what I need to do to live my best life.
Wishful thinking and pushing myself beyond my limits is not a plan. Living mindfully, finding joy in ordinary moments, and listening to the ebb and flow of what wants to emerge and grow and what wants to rest and be still works best.
Fortunately, after a long winter of rest and stillness, I’m having a respite from flareup of a long-time problem, and now I have time and energy to work on re-building my strength and healing.
We all have our own unique challenges. Just as seasons change, change happens in every life. Work with what wants to emerge in your life instead of fighting it.
And if you haven’t taken a look at my new website design, please do take a look around. What do you think?
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