New site update!
“The beginning is always today”
The start of a new year, though really arbitrary in the grand scheme of things, has always felt to me like the perfect time to start afresh. What better time to revisit my website, which I’ve admittedly neglected abysmally these past few years? This project has been on my list of things to do for this entire month, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to face it. I’ve had this site for over 20 years and have been through at least ten redesigns and changes of platform. It’s one of those projects where you think you’re done and then you discover some other little thing that needs adjusting, something that needs figuring out, and then you look at it on your phone and it looks lousy and you need to figure out how to fix that. And then you decide you need to make custom images for the home menu because you don’t like how the built-in images and text overlays are displaying…Of course this is all vastly simpler than the earlier days when I cobbled things together myself with my minimal HTML knowledge, but it’s still A PROJECT. I didn’t even intend to work on this today, but I sat down to update one little thing, then started playing with new templates, and lo and behold, twelve hours later, it’s more or less done!
At this point I have many hundreds of images, and it all became A LOT to manage. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I don’t need to have this site include Every Single Damn Thing That I’ve Ever Made. Nobody has the time or the interest to look through 20+ years of accumulated stuff. All that stuff, and the fact that I previously had separate Shop and Portfolio sections, made updating things feel like a huge burden, so I just stopped…
So I’ve radically simplified things - there is no longer a separate Shop section. I figured out a way to make the purchasable items look good enough for general viewing and to make the price and details fairly unobtrusive. I don’t want to be overly “salesy” but I also want to make it easy for someone to purchase something! I’ve deleted most of my old blog posts, because if I don’t care about them, why should anyone else? I’ve added a separate Kintsugi section because that is becoming one of my main focuses. I’ve made this blog section more prominent and intend to post more frequently. Perhaps a quixotic quest in this era of social media, but I mostly want to do it for myself and if someone happens to find it interesting, cool. That’s mostly the attitude I’ve been cultivating with artmaking in general. More to come on that, hopefully!