Don’t you love a good cliffhanger that begs you to click the damn link and continue reading while the pithy author takes your trust that they will deliver immediately on the promise of said cliffhanger and tosses it out the window in order to ramble on about a bunch of unrelated nothing? I sure do. Okay, back to the story.

The disaster unfolded, as many do, somewhere along the good-intentioned paved road to David Carson’s portfolio. I mean Hell. As I spent my days trying listlessly to get my own business off the ground, occasionally updating the site with old work to avoid the perils of looking not-too-busy, things were going well. Slow, but positive. Every couple of days I’d get a lead or a call or someone would drop me a line to tell me they’d given me a reference to someone in need. All well and good, but then I took a phonecall from my Dad.

And let me set this straight. My Dad is a wonderful man, and I say that knowing full well he reads every word I put onto this site, even though he’s not related to the design field at all. He’s just a good dad like that. Sure, he’s a little goofy from time to time but shit, look at me. I’ve practically made a living off being a goofball on this site, so we at least have that in common.

I get a call from my Dad who delivers the exciting news that he gave my name as a reference to someone he met at his job. And I responded the way I normally did which was to say “Great! Tell me more!” and he replied “…something something… nice little couple, owns a business, needs a website designed. I showed them your new website and said ‘he did this, and he could do the same thing for you!’”

And then my heart exploded. I’m sure you know why, but just in case you skipped those above paragraphs and miraculously found yourself rejoining the story at this exact spot, I’ll refresh you: I used a free blog, with a free blog template, to do nothing extraordinary at all and, in fact, something anyone with a computer in 2002 could very well do themselves. “They said they’d give it a look and give you a call if they were interested.”

At this point my mind played out the events of the near future, when the well-intentioned coupled who knew nothing of good or bad design visited my blog site to look at the blog site. Sure, there were “design” projects on the site, but they weren’t going to look at those, they were directed to look at the design of the site itself. And I’m sure they said …”meh.” And no. No, no, no they certainly did not give me a call.

My hard work was shattered. I had spent all of my time developing a site for other designers (namely, you) to look at, and had forgotten the common man! The person I would not introduce myself to! The person I could not show specifically what to look for! I, like the Emperor as he tumbled down the reactor shaft to his electric-blue-clouded death, thought to myself “Boy, I sure did not see that coming.”

It was clear a new site was needed. A new site that I actually had a hand in the creation of, and something that would never again allow that situation to develop again. To be continued…