Yesterday, while up to my eyeballs in CSS and transparent images, a surprising thought occurred to me for the first time:

Despite the fact that I’ve been pushing pixels out the door for paying customers for almost fifteen years, I have never had a website.

I have always been a blogger, and I have always used a blog to represent myself online, even when there were no blogs and I was writing in a hacked guestbook script. I’ve never had a website that, well, does what this one now does.

Some web designer.

Anyway, it was an interesting process, one which I have attempted and abandoned on two previous occasions. I think that what made the difference this time was the IWA Best Business Blog award at the end of March; blogging has been light not just because of the train thing, but because winning that award really stunned me.

I barely think of myself as a business; certainly not as a company or a service or – God forbid – a brand. And I certainly don’t think of myself as a business blogger, either; I mean, I blog about getting accidentally drunk and my dog, for pity’s sake.

But probably it was time to get a little more grown-up about this whole work thing, and that award was just the uncomfortable kick up the arse I needed. I’m grateful now in a way I wasn’t three months ago, and I feel a little better dressed for the occasion with the new design.

This redesign was a good exercise, though weeding out my portfolio was a bit of a shock – there were something like 35 sites in there, now trimmed down to a much more manageable 20. The hardest part was writing the About page, which was called “Services” for exactly ten seconds, all of which I spent wanting to kill myself. Now I just sound like the Internet’s Troy McClure instead.

No site is without its issues, so I would just like to go on record as telling any future clients, “Do as I say, not as I do.” No, you cannot have a 220k background image, for a start.

Some nice things:

• All old links still work, although you may want to re-point any links to SabrinaDent.com specifically to the blog.
• There is a colophon if you’re interested in the pieces that went into this.
• I now, apparently, have a newsletter. Trust me when I say: very infrequent.
• Social icons now behave like normal people’s social icons behave.
• And lo, there is a search box, like normal people have.

The search box makes me ridiculously happy.

PS: We lost some comments on the last entry when moving – so sorry.
PPS: My husband is a saint; I’ve put him through three days of hell.