Design Inspiration

I’d been wanting to redesign or relaunch my blog for a long time before I finally stopped writing at ridiculouslyextraordinary.com and launched karol.gajda.com.

I’m not a flashy person and I wanted a website that had a non-flashy appearance (and name).

My biggest inspirations were ZenHabits.net, RaamDev.com, and an older version of NDoherty.com. Actually, if you look at Raam’s site you’ll see I stole his idea for some naming conventions. And I specifically got the idea for custom post types from him. Had never heard of them before. This allows my Essays, Quick Thoughts, and Free Ideas to all have separate RSS feeds.

I know most people don’t care about these Quick Thoughts or my Free Ideas. They used to be separate blogs. Custom post types allowed me to consolidate everything into one blog, while still giving you an option about what to follow.

Technically, I could have designed the site myself. It would have been slow going, but I’ve done it many times before and I even did ridiculouslyextraordinary.com. But I swallow my own medicine. I can’t tell people to outsource stuff they don’t like if I don’t do it myself.

Since Niall’s site (NDoherty.com) was part of the inspiration here, and he’s a web designer traveling around the world without flying, I contacted him to create this for me. A few weeks later here we are.

How obvious was it that this was written specifically to link to a few people who I appreciate?