I have a guiltily pleasure that I’d like to get off my chest.

I love to tinker with a bit of client-side and server-side code from time to time.

Normally this secret desire to be a web designer/developer is limited to only some pointless or crazy idea that I’m toying around with that day. But every now and then it sees me playing with the real code that makes up sitepoint.com.

That rare occasion came calling last week as a lack of time and resources, with a desire to make something available to our customers left me with no other option. Now I’m not going to talk about how good or bad my skills were, nor about how scared our developers were at the thought of me writing code. What I wanted to share was the realization that when I became a developer for a day, I instantly stopped being a marketer.

Normally, when I need something new to go up on SitePoint, I’ll create a brief, get our designers to mock something up, then I’ll review and revise where needed, then it’s coded, more revisions, and so on.

When I was actually writing the code myself, I was having lots of fun worrying about things like what the HTML tag to use to strikethrough text, or trying to remember if I should use classes or ID to style my divs, and hoping that my hacky skills weren’t going to explode in IE.

Lucky for me, when I was done, I slept on it then looked at the page the following day with a fresh set of eyes. And what I saw, horrified me.

With all the HTML this, CSS that going on, I forgot to consider what is the message I’m conveying here, how will this page make users feel, is my call to action as strong as it could be, and does this page make any sense at all — essentially, I stopped thinking like a marketer.

It served as a good reminder that when you try to do too much, you’ll leave yourself with too many things to think about at once, and the important things will suffer. For some of you, you’ve go no choice but to be your own designer, developer, copywriter, and marketer but at a minimum you should wear those hats separately rather than all at once, because if you don’t, that larger tower of hats on the top of your head will come crashing down.

It might lead to some crazy self talking and hat swapping activity. but when your about to start coding a page, ask yourself, has your designer hat designed this, and has your marketing hat briefed this properly.

Posted in Business Thoughts  |  Tagged in multitasking