Under the hood

A lot of decisions go into building a product from an idea. This subsite goes into the rationale behind the choices made.

I was building a website for my spouse's phone mentoring business when I thought that with a little more effort I could make a tool that others could use to make their own website. Almost 10 years later, I am glad I am at the end, but many times I wondered that if I knew that it would take so long whether I would have followed through with it in the first place. A concept is always a lot simpler than all the moving parts that are actually required to make the basic functionality work.

While it has taken that long, a lot of the early years were occupied with sorting through ideas rather than building anything. My spouse's site was going through a lot of changes, so I was spending a lot of time implementing them, but they led to a lot of thinking about how to accommodate and manage changes, not only to site content, but also to its structure.

Hopefully, enumerating and discussing the various choices and the thinking behind them as I built Smallsite Design will be helpful to others who may have a idea, but are perplexed as to what they might need to get their heads around to make it a reality.