It’s important to always look at the places (and designs) that you have come from. It teaches you something about yourself, and more importantly – it teaches you what you have progressed to and learned. Right on schedule and usually right around the beginning of summer I find myself bored and looking for new web-based projects to start with.

This is usually the time I give some grand sales pitch to my lead investor (named Mom) about how I’ve figured out how to create a site that is going to “be the next Twitter” or something ridiculous along those lines. She usually buys into it and I find myself with three more domain names, a new wordpress installation and a few solid days (or weeks) of coding.

Once the project is done, I usually get bored of it quickly. Either discouraged by the lack of users and interest or my focus being pulled in yet another direction, the site becomes stale and un-updated. On the surface, this seems very foolish. Here I am spending all this money to create a site that I do not use and do not sell or profit from whatsoever.

It took me a while to realize that what I gain is the knowledge of how I created it. While SillyApp or App Store Spotlight might not be sites populated by anyone other that russian spam bots, I learned a lot about various content management systems as well as PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, XHTML, WordPress, PHPBB, etc. All of these skills have been used since to help me work on actual websites.

I plan on taking a look at all my projects and finding out what I’ve learned from them. After that, I’ll probably do a big overhaul of my development website and try to tie everything together. From there, I’ll be open for business and start working on a number of websites that I’ve promised.

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