Does anyone completely secondguess their layout or is it just me?

[nihil0]

So, I completed the move from my old layout about a week or so ago, updated all the pages, made everything fit relatively well with each other, took literal months due to offline life, yknow, happening but now that the moments passed I can't help but be kind of dissatisfied???

It's not that I'm not proud of myself or my work but now I'm months older and know more than I did when I conceptualized the update as a whole and now I'm thinking of how much easier it could be to navigate, add pages, etc. etc. and it's just kinda spoiled my mood about it LMAO

Anyone else have something similar happen? How do I even begin to fix this

[Dazhak]

I have had a lot of back and forward with may layouts and what I can say is:

Write down everything you think you could change for the better. Then sort into two ordered lists, one after difficulty and one after how much you want to do them. This can make it easier to find what to work on next.
If you are not usually one who writes updated pages separately, try to do that! Meaning you could make a new layout in a separate html doc so you won't have to worry about inconsistencies across your whole website.

You should also let yourself take a break from webmastering if you feel like it, since you just coded a bunch of stuff. Hope any of this helped!

[Paprika]

I felt a lot like this in the early stage of my website until I decided that I didn't cared much about making something logical or simple and just rolled with it. Everything could be easier, faster, better, etc. But then I would be a professionnal coder and it's something I'll never be !

[nihil0]

If you are not usually one who writes updated pages separately, try to do that! Meaning you could make a new layout in a separate html doc so you won't have to worry about inconsistencies across your whole website.

I do! That's actually kind of a source for one of the problems I have, I find my own site rather difficult to navigate because it's all contained on a big iframe that sifts through tens of other pages with no solid way to just jump to a page.

A list is a good idea, i have a problem with Never Planning My Pages, so that would probably be a step in the right direction lol

I felt a lot like this in the early stage of my website until I decided that I didn't cared much about making something logical or simple and just rolled with it. Everything could be easier, faster, better, etc. But then I would be a professionnal coder and it's something I'll never be !

I appreciate the sentiment! I've always thought of my work a similar way, it's something that grows with me and my style which can differ at all times. My main issue is just personal accessibility, it can look how I like but that doesn't mean anything if I'm unhappy actually getting around the site to look at it!

[Kallistero]

For my websites, one thing that curbs this is to give them heterogenous themes. That's to say, each page doesn't have to look like any of the others, and there can be multiple layouts for the site.    The challenge is that it's creatively intensive to think up different ways that things can be presented, but there's fun in being able to work on it just by exploring your other interests & seeing what might inspire your next creative direction. If you don't like your layout, try experimenting!

If it's specific elements that you don't like and changing it is a challenge, it can be useful to just have little notes or code comments to take away the tedium of hunting things down, like "if I want to change this, go here & here" or "TODO: change this to that when this other part is ready." You might even keep a whole work-in-progress page, just to hold notes or examples of changes you want to make!

[brisray]

My sites use a really simple layout because, a) the content isn't really suited to have a complicated layout and b) I haven't got the imagination to make anything more complicated.

Even when you create a good layout there's usually several ways of making it.

With 4,000 HTML 20,000 other files it's difficult to change the entire site at once, so i don't even try. New pages get the latest templates and older pages get them when I update them.

What I do is keep track of the site chnnges, I keep a document where I write things I want to do to the site and I make test pages before I change the live pages.