The Website Graveyard: Burning It All Down & Starting FreshMy New Website
The Impulsive Purge (And Instant Regret)
There’s a special kind of madness that strikes at 3 AM—the sudden, unshakable conviction that your entire online presence must die. No backup. No plan. Just the delete button and the eerie calm of a blank digital slate. My old website, with its cobwebbed galleries and outdated bio, deserved its fate. But as the sun rose, so did the cold sweat: Now what?
WordPress templates promised salvation. They lied. What began as a breezy afternoon of drag-and-drop devolved into a typographic nightmare. Fonts mocked me. Padding values conspired against me. Enter Piper, my CSS Yoda, who fixed in five minutes what would’ve cost me a week of Googling “why is my header floating in hell.” Lesson learned: Pride is cheaper than therapy, but friends are free.
The Image Graveyard: When Archives Attack
The real horror emerged in Lightroom. Years of “I’ll sort this later” avalanched into 14,000 unsorted raws. Barcelona-era shots lurked in folders named things like “_FINAL_FINAL_3”. I’d forgotten entire photoshoots. Forgotten clients. The sheer volume of “maybe this one?” was paralyzing.
Temporary placeholders now haunt the site like digital squatters—test images of alley cats and half-finished portraits. They’ll be evicted soon, probably. Maybe. (Or they’ll fossilize into permanent fixtures, the way Ikea temporary furniture becomes family heirlooms.)
A radical thought: Hire an editor. Someone ruthless enough to murder my darlings. Because left to my own devices, I’ll agonize over a 2008 snapshot of a foggy bus stop like it’s the Zapruder film.
The Pre-2007 Black Hole (Nostalgia Not Included)
Everything before Barcelona got the digital shredder. Those early shots—awkward, overprocessed, brimming with the confidence of someone who’d just discovered the “vignette” slider—can stay buried. Except… maybe that one series from Prague. Or the Lisbon cafe shots. Damn it.
Fine. A retrospective blog post might happen. But only if I can resist the urge to “just tweak the white balance” on decade-old JPEGs.