I’ve been working on a new book for five years now.

And it’s not about usability or UX.

It’s about writing.

I’ve never made any secret about the fact that I find writing to be ridiculously hard work, and for me, a source of, well…agony is probably the best word. And I’ve been doing it for forty years.

And not being a big fan of agony, over the years I’ve slowly found some things that make writing easier (no, not alcohol), and produce better results—things I wish someone had told me back when I started out. And for five years now I’ve been trying to shape them into a book.

Of course, the problem is this is writing.

I don’t have a due date. When people ask, I just say I’m hoping to get it done while I still have enough brain cells left to do it.

It’s been 10 years since I last redesigned my site.

There, I said it. That feels better.

Every so often, one of my readers will suggest, ever so gently and kindly, that my site is…well…kind of…sort of…old looking. And about once a year, someone will suggest that it’s…awful.

And personally, I’ve never taken it personally.

For a long time, people said the same kind of thing about Jakob Nielsen’s site. In fact, at one point there were a lot of redesigned versions of his site floating around that people had done for free.

It’s not that I ever thought looks didn’t count. It was more a matter of two things:

• It worked well enough. It did what I needed a site to do.
• I didn’t look embarrassingly bad. (In fact, in a way I kind of liked the way it looked.)

But as usual, even if you’re successfully dragging your feet the world eventually intrudes. In this case, the awful third-party solution I’d been using for years to provide a mobile version finally went out of business, so I finally decided to bite the bullet and use a modern theme with responsive design–and better accessibility–built in.

It was a ton more work than I’d hoped, even with my son Harry working with me, which made it much more pleasant. But I’m glad that it’s done, and that I don’t have to think about it for another ten years. 🙂