SOOO… I BUILT A WEBSITE.

Which sounds very simple when I type it like that.

It was not. 😂

When I decided WhyNotHuntsville needed its own home outside of social media, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted it to feel like.

The problem was, I had absolutely no idea how to make that happen.

So I learned.

I learned Squarespace. I learned just enough CSS & Java to become dangerous. I obsessed over spacing, colors, fonts, buttons, icons, navigation, mobile layouts and things I didn't even know existed before I started this.

I moved things two pixels and then moved them back. I redesigned things I had already redesigned (kind of like what I do in my house, I’ve been told I’m the most redocrating-est decorator some people know). I stared at my laptop until everything started looking wrong, closed it, came back the next day and decided it was actually fine. 😂

And somewhere in all of that blood, sweat, tears and an unreasonable number of browser tabs, WhyNotHuntsville started to look like the thing that had been living in my head.

That part means a lot to me.

Because this isn't a template I picked because it looked cool, it’s not a template at all. I wanted the website to actually feel like WhyNotHuntsville.

Huntsville's space and technology history is woven through it, but so is the Huntsville that exists right now: the art, music, food, nightlife, people, weird little pockets of culture and all of the things happening here that deserve to be discovered.

I built the pages. I wrote the copy. Somewhere along the way, I ended up creating an entire visual language around this little platform I've been growing one post, one event and one ridiculous idea at a time.

And I did all of it myself.

I think that's probably the part I'm proudest of.

WhyNotHuntsville started as an Instagram page because I kept hearing the same thing: “There’s nothing to do in Huntsville.” And I knew better.

There were things to do. Plenty of them. The problem was that people didn’t always know about them. Events, experiences and interesting pockets of the city were happening all around us, but the information was scattered across social media, flyers, venue pages and word of mouth.

So I started putting it all in one place.

And somewhere along the way, what started as a page became a platform.

The website feels like the next step in that.

It gives WhyNotHuntsville somewhere to exist beyond the feed. Somewhere you can explore what's happening, find things you may have missed, submit something I should know about, work with WNH, grab some merch and, now, read the things I have more to say about than I can reasonably cram into a caption.

Which brings me here.

Field Notes.

I've always loved writing, and social media doesn't always leave much room for it. Sometimes I visit somewhere and there's more I want to say. Sometimes it's an experience. Sometimes it's a conversation. Sometimes it's just something about Huntsville that makes me curious enough to look a little closer.

This is where those stories will go.

There are probably still things I'll tweak around the website because apparently I have become a person who has opinions about website padding now.

But I'm incredibly proud of what I've built.

WhyNotHuntsville officially has a home.

The Explorer's Roadmap to Huntsville is live. 🚀

Go explore it. Click around. Tell me what you find.

And if something is off...

No it isn't. 😂