I’m getting ready to launch a new design for my personal site. It’s not perfect, and it’s not complete.

There are more improvements I can make to the design, more types of content I’d like to add, more landing pages, search options, better taxonomy: a whole host of things. I could work to get all of those things done before I launch, and it would be quite some time before I launch.

Or I can take a deep breath, accept the imperfection, and get ready to press the launch button.

It’s entirely possible that somebody will look at my work and think, wow, that’s pretty shoddy. Look at this bug and that bug. He must not care about quality.

I do, I care very much about quality. And I can continue to care about quality if I launch before the quality is perfect. I can get feedback, maybe some negative feedback, and I can then iterate from there. But If I wait until I have everything just right, it may never be.

Is what I have right now better than before? I think so.

I’ll talk more about the work I’ve done on this relaunch, but I’m using some more modern front-end tools and techniques, and I’ve learned a lot so far. I built a new partial structure with Sass, integrated Typekit, used a new Drupal base theme (Aurora), and did some design prototyping with Pattern Lab. I tried out a workflow that used Grunt and git, and so far I like it.

I had fun developing the color scheme, which is based on colors used at the recently remodeled Union Depot in St. Paul. I selected fonts to match the feel of that train depot. My plans for this site should fit in well with a depot metaphor.

There may be more I can improve, but there are things I’m pretty excited about right now.

So deep breath. Do what I can now, then continue to improve.

Steeling my nerves.