What I Would Like To See

[An'Angelia Thompson]

I could really use some help with using computer applications. Things like using HTML (which I've been stumbling through successfully but I may need to become an alcoholic to continue!), inserting video, slideshows, things of that nature.

I could also use some feedback on my newly udated website. It's WORLDS better than the original much more cohesive, but any critiques are appreciated.

I would also like to be able to post a painting and get a serious critique - ie., what works, what doesn't., etc.

Hope this wishlist helps, Sloanne!

[An'Angelia Thompson]

I put the "hyperlink" to website on the above post, but I don't see it. See.......I'm in desperate need of help! LOL
website is www.angeliasart.com

[Tom David]

Will check out your web site. What computer applications are you talking about? Not sure of the value of posting work to this site other than to get feed back from members.. I don't think this is a venue for marketing work. Anybody sell anything off this web site?

[An'Angelia Thompson]

Using HTML or a good reference for learning it on my own. How to insert slideshows on a page. How to insert videos on a page. How to insert links on a page, etc. As I thought I clearly stated, I'm looking for critique - NOT marketing. To me, a critique comment is "Did you think of darkening the lower left corner?" NOT "wow, this is great". Compliments that stroke the ego are wonderful - we all love them. But I'm looking for comments that will potentially help my growth as an artist.

[Spence Munsinger]

Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML, for a book on coding html and styling it correctly.

Try Wordpress as a structure, and use that to hold content (and to blog with) - it includes built-in gallery function, or you can customi9ze pages within it.

[Spence Munsinger]

One more comment - why Wordpress? I wrote three different websites for my work - from scratch - took three to five weeks of work, and changing was painful each time. The problem is I get bored or tired of the current look, or see something I'd like to organize my site around - and each time I scratched that itch I lost weeks into it. Wordpress keeps the content separate from the presentation - and that means changing the look can be two weeks if you start with a really obscure and badly written Wordpress theme and end up writing much of it from scratch, to my last re-write which took four days.

Some of that can be achieved by using CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) - but you can find the beginnings of the look you want in a wordpress theme and get it tweaked to something you love in literally a couple of days, and then add plugins (added functionality) on a whim.

Hope this helps

[Martin Garcia]

I saw you website. It, at first glance, is exhausting. I find it hard to get to your paintings. I am first expected to click to get into the "Gallery" but it only takes me to a place where I have to "pick a door". That page is frightening for a passive viewer. If you want people to see your work, show it to them. There are far too many reasons to not look at art in this world, if someone is trying to, make it easy on them. From there I found myself looking through you main nav bar, but, because there was no constant format between pages I found it a bit confusing. I didn’t know what was yours and what was advertising. It was also hard to focus on any of the text.

That is probably more than you need and if you would like to talk more about these sorts of things I would be happy to help, I don't know everything but I have been building arts websites for about five years or so.

Learning HTML is easy when you put it into practice right away. This is why I always recommend http://www.w3schools.com Go there and be amazed at their tutorials.

I would also recommend not storing video on your server - let YouTube do that and just embed it onto your site from there, they give you the code so you just copy and paste it where you want it to go.

[An'Angelia Thompson]

Martin! Thank you so much! This is exactly the kind of helpful advice I'm looking for. I thought I was making my site "less boring" by setting up the gallery that way. Your insights are very helpful to me - now what to do about it! If you have any suggestions on what I might do to make it better, please message me here or my email address is [e-mail]. Thanks also for the HTML link. I'll check it out!

[Martin Garcia]

We'll keep it public for now so that others can chime in also.

Now you might want to start by looking at other sites and finding out what you like and don't like about those. That is time consuming because you will have to look at a lot of websites to figure out what you like. You may find that you like a more scattered look or feel than corporate sites or visa versa, either way, liking your site is the first step in marketing, or promoting it.

I would also ask yourself if you want to learn HTML and things like that from your true inquisitive nature or if it is just the only way you know to build a website. I am not trying to discourage your learning HTML or CSS but there are ways around it.

You needn't reinvent the wheel, Check out http://otherpeoplespixels.com/ if you are interested in out of the box websites, or just look at the way those sites are structured it might give you some good ideas.

Another way we get caught reinventing the wheel is trying to emulate other sites by hand, you might like the table structure of a certain site, (now this may technically be copyright infringement) you can view and copy snippets of the source code of that HTML site and use it as a skeleton to build your site off of.

I hope this was helpful
Martin

[An'Angelia Thompson]

Thank you all for your feedback! Martin, I actually did look at a few sights before I re-designed mine, and as you stated, it's EXHAUSTING! That's actually how I came up with the "Galleries" page! I've gotten about a 50/50 response for and against. I think what I'm going to do is simplify the look of the page by removing all the rectangles and using just a simple image and script per subject. I have almost 100 images (they aren't all loaded yet), and I thought it would help keep people on the site longer if they could pick and choose what to view by subject.

I still have a LOT of work to do to make it cohesive. I started out using a template with black/gray striping. Decided (almost as I added the final page) that I HATED it! I still have to remove it from some of the pages.

Spence, thanks for the info on Wordpress. I really don't want to learn HTML, but in using other sites (blogspot, facebook, etc.) it seems that it would be to my advantage to learn at least the basics, ie., posting links. What a pain in the butt!

[Slone Fries]

I would like to have these topics all touched on by An'Angelia, Tom, Spence, and Martin in the Discussion forum What I would like to seewhich I featured this last week in the future in Artist Knowledge. I am closing this discussion this evening only so that group members see the three things we need to get going. Your all on my list!