the couchdate website is up!

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Put the Damn Thing Out There

Quick little calendar for this week

Now that the formalities are dealt with, to business - couchdate finally has a website. It took about 5 years give or take a couple. I can’t tell you how many drafts were scrapped, how many designers were messaged, emailed, chatted on the phone with, reference material sent to, google forms filled. I’ll spare you the long checklist of items that didn’t lead to a website, but I do want you to know that it was long. But why?

I come from a generation where websites needed to be coded. They were custom built, to a degree, providing the specific functions you wanted. Static, simple, and “easy” to navigate. I was never one for Flash, CSS, or anything fancy. Some tables, a dancing baby or two, and basic HTML told me what I needed to be told, and took me where I needed to go.

Examples of early web “design”

And the dancing baby, which many of our substack subscribers may be a bit too young to recognize.

My point being, I remember when it was a big deal to have a website. There’s something so official, so final? It has to be just right. The domain name has to be perfect. I need a designer who really understands that couchdate is different. It has to have the right fonts and features and cool little clicky things that no one else’s website has. This has been a really hard feeling to let go of.

And so, for the last four years, couchdate hasn’t had a website. Until now. Nudged very consistently by one of our staff and with a few $$ donations, I let go of my aspirations of having the coolest wesbite ever, and went to where dreams go to die - Squarespace.

I picked a template, changed the colors, and plugged my shit into it. A few hours and a hundred dollars later we were live. And now that it’s been a few weeks, I have to say - it’s pretty nice. To just put the thing out there. To not wait until it’s just so, to not have complete control, to allow it to be just what it is. Not using perfection to build molehills up into mountains. And not letting ideas of what things were or could be prevent them from actually being something. Life is hard, websites shouldn’t be. This is where I would do my Squarespace if I was sponsored.

https://www.couchdate.org/

*For a little more info on the title reference and figure on the calendar