Website Whoas

I wish I had some art to show this week, but unfortunately 80% of my time has gone INTO THE WEBSITE.

I tend to do this - instead of just adding a few more pictures to my website, I decide to rewrite the whole thing. This year, I'm adding some Flash galleries, and I figured out how to do a php contact form. I've never worked with Flash or php before. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm not a web designer. Let's make that clear. I wouldn't even say I dabble in web design, or that I particularly enjoy it. It's just been a necessity for the past 10 years. When I first started showing my work online, there was no DeviantArt or the many other gallery sites - at least not that I could find. Everyone had a Geocities site. I got myself one and an "HTML for Dummies" book and went at it.

My first site was hand-coded in a text-based HTML editor. It didn't take long to memorize how to format tables and all the "a href=" "" and so forth. But that wasn't enough!! By then I was getting the hang of Photoshop, and soon started to make Photoshop-based sites with slices and rollovers, figuring it out by trial and error and whatever tutorials I could find.

Sometime in the past 6 years or so, I did take a web design class or two, and ended up with Adobe Dreamweaver. Having such an advanced site builder/editor was a miraculous advancement. I could build and modify and maintain sites so much easier - I even made a couple for some other people! And for the most part, the little things I knew how to do or could figure out were enough. But never for my own site!

One of the big questions is always, "How do I display images online in a way convenient and interesting to viewers?" You have to think about loading times, and thumbnails, and galleries and navigation. How many images to show and how many to leave out, how to display them, how to protect them, so on and so forth. I've always wanted to use Flash galleries, and I've had Adobe Flash for some time, but no idea how to use it. This year, I found some fantastic tutorials and tackled it.

I just spent the last hour and a half trying to add a tiny preloader to my first gallery (which took me two hours to build) and so far failing. It's been like this every day. Two steps forward, one and a half back, incredibly slow. The payoff is that it's a thing I toss up on the Internet and can leave alone for a year. But these weeks putting it together... AUGH.

The website though... beyond this blog, beyond my DA account, beyond my online AAU portfolio - the website is the home of my artwork online. It has to speak for my work, not just where it is and what it is, but where I want it to be and how I want others to interpret my professionalism most of all. If I will spend hours and hours polishing a website to the best of my ability, having no clue whatsoever what I'm doing... imagine what I'll do with a piece of artwork.

Then I'll have to rebuild a gallery to contain it. =P