It Takes a Village (and Mine Doesn’t Include a Web Designer)
(Important side note: it totally does — plus a few graphic designers, even. This is not about them. This is about me being stubborn, terrible at asking for help, and irrationally convinced that one community college class in computer networking and some half-remembered Geocities-era HTML qualify me to run a fully functional modern website.)
Lately, I’ve been trying to do All The Things™:
🎨 Web design
🧠 Branding
🧵 CSS tweaks
🔧 Theme customization using tools I learned about 30 seconds ago
All while running a business and staying hydrated.
(So far I’m batting .500.)
And folks, I am not a designer.
It’s been humbling in the way only misaligned buttons and cursed mobile menus can be. If you were lucky enough to check out my website this weekend, you may have witnessed some truly cursed visuals.
I spent literal hours trying to get a font to render correctly.
I now know what a TTF file is. And a WOFF2 file.
I poked around in HTML, CSS, Handlebars, and corners of my computer I previously didn’t know existed.
“Just install Yarn,” they said.
Cool cool cool.
What the hell is Yarn?
What is Node.js?
What is a font weight?
Why am I here?
Meanwhile, I managed to separately break my DNS settings at least seven times.
My monitor has needed a firmware update for over a year, but I still don’t own a USB-to-USB cable so it flickers off every few minutes like a haunted regret box.
At one point, I genuinely thought I was typing into the command line.
Reader, I was not. I was in Notepad.
"Every time you talk about computers, I think about how you plugged your monitor into the integrated graphics card three times."
And it hit me:
This must be what it feels like to do your own accounting.
You’re smart. You’re capable. You can do hard things. But you didn’t sign up to learn GAAP or QuickBooks error codes or how to fix a balance sheet that’s been out of balance since 2022.
You just wanted to know:
Am I okay? Is my business okay?
And now it’s 11pm and you’re Googling “what does unapplied cash payment mean” and screaming into your keyboard.
Same, friend.
I just wanted my fonts to show up and my buttons to work and to look cute.
Is that so much to ask?
Here’s your reminder — and mine:
You don’t have to be good at everything. You’re allowed to hand things off.
Sometimes it takes a village.
And sometimes the village accountant is face-down in design hell, muttering about gulpfile.js.
If the financial side of your business feels like it’s actively trying to hurt you, I get it.
You don’t need to become an accountant.
You just need one who gets it.