This week I discovered that one of my main skills in life is underestimating the time needed to accomplish a task (and/or overestimating my ability to consistently get things done at a superhuman speed).

The goal for this week was to rebuild The Back 40 website in order to accomplish a variety of objectives: first, it would allow me to dive back into making ads/driving people to the website with a clear conscience; second, it was in desperate need of a facelift pretty much since it was built; third, there were underlying issues that I didn’t know how to solve beyond starting from scratch and building it up from the bottom.

The end result would be not only a rebuilt website, but also a video providing a side by side walkthrough of the old vs the new site. The intent of this was to highlight the thought that went on behind the scenes—I can’t claim to be a web designer with an amazing eye for all things creative, but I can walk people through my own thought processes in an attempt to help anyone else who might be in a similar position (small business, on a budget, unable to hire someone to do all that stuff for them).

However, as I stated above, I severely underestimated the amount of time that would go into this. After doing some pretty intense reflection, I realized that when I proposed the redesign, I was proposing just that—a redesign. In my mind, that’s a very cosmetic, not-super-technical, probably-within-my-range-of-things-I-can-do-in-a-week task to complete.

I neglected to think through the fact that the cosmetic part of it was just a part of what really needed to happen in order for the website to be something I would feel comfortable directing customers towards. The main part of what needed to happen was more digging into the root cause of the issues in the first place and then rebuilding pretty much the same site—but cleaner, faster, and with no neverending redirect loops.

Also, and this is where the cover photo for this post comes into play, I was totally not anticipating the ground blizzard that overtook us here in Minnesnowta this weekend. Instead of spending a full day of working on rebuilding the website, I helped dig out 6 cars from a less-than-half-mile stretch of road directly in front of my house (one of whom was my sister who narrowly avoided being hit by a truck roughly the size of Texas). Although one of my main goals for my time in Praxis and life in general is to be timely and focused, family is still a priority in my life that (apparently, given my actions) takes precedence sometimes.

Anyway, despite the random stuff of life that happens, I still was able to make progress with the rebuild! Although it’s not completely build out yet to the point where it would make sense to film a walk-through of it, I do plan on finishing it—even though the official project month will be over.