Fickle-minded Designer

Initial blog theme

If you've been here before you'd notice that I changed my blog theme. I tend to be very fickle-minded when I design something. It feels especially difficult for me when I don't have control over all the elements.

In LiveJournal I was able to learn how to hack my blog's layout and design so it was pretty easy for me to make my blog look a certain way. A free WordPress account gives you a decent amount of freedom when customizing how your blog looks, but total control requires you to upgrade, which I am not willing to shell out for right now.

I'm warming up to the idea of having limited customizing ability here in WordPress, though. It felt a bit stressful at first, not having total control and all. But, eventually, I realized since I don't have to worry about every little element then it's actually even less stressful. I just have to choose a theme and create a header that I think matches or complements the theme and I'm done!

There is a book written by Barry Schwartz entitled "The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less", which discusses how eliminating choices for consumers can greatly reduce anxiety of shoppers. He provides psychological analysis and explanation for this argument, which I'm not going to expound on, but you can read about it on its Wikipedia page here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less). Basically, this paradox explains the contrast between my experience with customizing my LiveJournal blog before and my WordPress blog now.

I'm curious, have any of you had any experiences that can be explained by the paradox of choice? Care to share your thoughts?