My firsts thoughts about committing to regular technical writing surfaced quite a long time ago. Since I am a perfectionist – I quickly assembled a “complete” plan for getting the site up and running in a professional way.
The Plan included things like:
- Coming up with a name
- Getting a domain (going back to the step 1 if taken) and hosting
- Finding a good designer
- Finding a good WordPress developer
- Finding a good SEO specialist
- Finding a Google Analytics expert
- Doing a comprehensive content planning
- Setting up a CI/automatic backups/pre-production environment
- Setting up Social Media integrations and a mailing list
- Establishing short and long-term goals
- … and many other things
The first two were completed quite quickly but remaining items could not be handled at the same pace so I ended up stuck at ~10% completion rate… for a couple of months.
Dealing with remaining list items was seriously time/money consuming and not really giving any visible results – the only noticeable change was the omnipresent feeling of anxiety when looking at the long list and realizing how much needs to be done in order to be able to release the first post the right way.
At some point, I realized that most of my favourite sites are not state-of-the-art when it comes to the technical side of blogging which reminded me of The Pareto Principle and the idea of Minimal Viable Product.
The last thing needed to get past Pareto’s 20% and complete the MVP was to set up the WordPress engine and start writing. It could be done in one evening.
… so here it is – up and running and serving the purpose.
Also, check this great talk by Greg Young – it’s somehow related.
