Tending to my personal website like a garden

I'm an artist and maker. This newsletter is where I share what I’m making, figuring out, or what currently occupies my mind. Expect these notes from the studio about every week. Thank you for being here. 🌸

I dream of one day living in a small off-grid house with a real garden: vegetables, fruit trees, maybe some chickens. But for now, living in a Berlin apartment, the closest thing I have is my website (and some kitchen herbs). Like a garden, it is never finished. Time takes over, it gets messy and needs tending to, but sometimes it surprises me how much it can yield without being perfect.

Something I often hear from other creatives is: "My website needs a big overhaul", or I visit someone's page and somewhere it says "placeholder" or "work in progress", implying a finished version is coming at some point in the future. But what if we see websites as places that are never finished and treat them as living spaces, evolving and ongoing?

I met someone new the other day, and as often happens, they asked to see some of my work. Normally, I'd show them my Instagram page on my phone, but since I'm taking a break from social media, I couldn't. The person I was talking to didn't have Instagram either, leaving me with no easy way to show my work. They asked, "Don't you have a website?". I did, but at that moment, it was only bullet points of text, and the homepage didn't give a good visual overview of what I do.

A few days later, without social media to distract me, I spent half a day updating my website, adding 20 images that I feel give a strong visual overview of my work. But it was hard to publish the update, it didn't feel good enough, and it wasn't perfect. I once told my boyfriend, who is convinced I'm a perfectionist, "I can't be one, because nothing I ever do is perfect". That about sums it up. I can't be a perfectionist because I think my work isn't good enough.

1/2 a day of honest work on my website

Obviously, the update wasn't a fancy portfolio page with sleek animated carousels of high-resolution imagery. The 20 images are the minimally viable version of what I needed; it got the job done and could be made in a day. I remembered the idea of the 70% rule by Campbell Walker of Struthless. The rule goes as follows: aim to complete a task to 70% of your ideal, not 100%, helping you start, make progress, and finish without getting trapped by perfectionism. I looked at the updated page and decided I would grade it with a 7 out of 10, and decided to hit publish.

A few days later, it already paid off. At a vernissage, I was introduced to a gallerist who wanted to see my work. I pulled up my website, and I was able to show them my work. It worked, better even than Instagram would have. Instead of just the latest posts, the 20 images show work from across different years, different expressions of my work (physical, digital), and different scales.

A personal website doesn't need to be perfect; you add new things, you prune away what no longer fits, you build out new pages when you have the time, and leave other parts alone for a while. If you think of your website as a living thing, rather than a concrete structure to be unveiled only once, it becomes easier to take care of it one git commit at a time.