A colleague of mine once said, “I know a lot of smart people, but I have never met anyone smart like you who said they would do something and actually do it.”
Well, I meant it when I said that I was going to “build” my website. What can I say, I probably got those unshakable willpower genes from my Korean parents. They never lectured me on it but rather showed me through their action what it means to be “fully committed”. I learned how to pour myself into the things I want to achieve and leave nothing in reservedness. Even if I don’t get to achieve that exact thing, I haven’t lost anything because I’m stronger for having tried.
When COVID gave me a bunch of lemons (time at home), I decided to make homemade lemonade (a website) by squeezing my brain really hard. >.<
I started the process by drawing out each page on a piece of paper, like a storyboard, without knowing exactly ‘how’ it was going to be done. But ‘how’ was secondary; knowing ‘what’ I wanted to create wasn’t easy, so I had to dig myself deeper to find the answer. After that, it was just a series of the decision-making process from A to Z, from colours to fonts to layouts to a logo. I even took a short course on Adobe Illustrator and learned just enough of the basics to create a simple logo. I didn’t have a photo (and didn’t know any photographer), so I reached out to a cameraman whom I met on the Kim’s Convenience’s set. Just like that, I was creating something from nothing.
Someone asked me what the hardest part of building my website was. My answer was, “no hardest part because everything was just simply hard.” I’m not a tech-savvy person (far from it), so it nearly killed me. I abused my arms (that were already bad from excessive typing and translating) so much to the point that it became too painful to even click!
Long story short, I launched my website www.koreaninterpreter.ca on my birthday in September 2020. I celebrated the hard birth of my website as well as my birth (which wasn’t an easy birth either, according to my mom).
The good news is that I started getting business from it the very next day of launching it, and my clientele is growing ever since!
Another good news is that I can maintain the website myself. I now joke that website building can be my side gig (as I have this inflated confidence that I could build another simple one easily), but the truth is, I never want to do this tedious work again! But I’m glad to have finished it because I got the domain a year prior to that, so this was a long-overdue job!
www.koreaninterpreter.ca still has a long way to go, but it is finally here to stay.
한국어 
English