Last week, I shared some insight into the initial process of developing a custom blog design or custom website design.  I actually have had a number of people email me and ask me about my job, what it’s like to be a blog designer, how one gets into the business of custom blog designs and how I go about creating a designer blog.  A lot of people want to know how I got started as a blog designer and custom website designer.  The answer is this.  I started my own blog!  I had the most horrible job back in 2009, like, soul-crushing, I literally couldn’t sleep at night, and my late husband used to say that the only time I was happy was on Friday afternoons as soon as work was over.  He said that by Saturday I was already clearly having anxiety about Monday and to be quite frank, it ruined a lot of weekends for us, and I feel guilty still about that.  So, I had to get out (if this is you, get out, get out, do whatever you can to leave that job, life is way too short!).  I began working in a coffee shop, making about one-fifth of what I had made before (which wasn’t a lot) but of course I was not feeling challenged creatively or mentally.  So I decided to start a blog.

There were already a few big, famous design bloggers but not that many, and it was all still fairly new.  So I started Little Blue Deer on Google Blogger.  A lot of people ask me about how I came up with the name Little Blue Deer, so as an aside, a friend in college used to tell me that I look like a deer (it could be worse, she could have said elephant!) and that has been my nickname ever since.  The Little Blue was just a crazy and divine flash of inspiration, and now I like to use it ironically, you will notice that everything on my site is pink, black and gold, but then again, I’m an ironic gal.  I started my own designer blog on Blogger, it was back in the days of the Minima blog design template, like, bare bones.  I had already learned the Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop and Illustrator mainly) in an old job, so I created a custom blog header (featuring, of course, a little blue deer) popped it in, and I was off.

Many of my clients are brand-new to blogging and they always ask me how to start out.  I’m a huge fan of learning by doing, sure, you will sweat a lot and have some late nights, but there’s just no real substitute for learning under the gun, or learning by doing.  So if you have any interest at all in either working as a professional blog designer or designing your own blog, the first step is to get a blog up on the Internet.  Google Blogger is free, you don’t need to purchase a domain name (though your blog will have the .blogspot.com extension) and for self-hosted WordPress you will need to purchase a domain name and hosting.  More articles on the difference between these two platforms later, but the main thing is to take the first step, establish that blog and write your first post!