Tweaking & nitpicking
#002: Perfectionist time sinks
I love tweaking.
One of my favourite web design things to do is playing with CSS, making sure it’s all pixel perfect (which includes toggling from browser to paint program to web editor endlessly). I love copy editing. Now that I’m steaming ahead from WordPress novice to power user I’m loving fiddling with the PHP code.
For you non-geeks, this all amounts to one thing and the clue was in the endlessly mentioned above. Tweaking takes time. It takes a lot of time. It takes far more time than it deserves.
Who notices when the spacing is slightly off that you need to measure it in a paint program to detect it? No one! So why am I spending my precious time playing with it?!
Learning from my mistakes
Perfectionist has a nice ring to it, but I now decree it to be a heinous insult.
I think this goes back to something I alluded to in an earlier post of mine - spreading myself too thinly - prioritising is key. It’s far more important to get a rough and ready first version out asap, than to keep trying to make it perfect (which, let’s face it, is a hopeless task).
As IanW stated, “knowing when to finish” is the key.
