Saturday, March 23, 2013

A New Look


There are lots of textile art projects I should have been working on this week, but, inspired by several conversations with "artsy" and "quilty" friends about their marketing techniques and different ways to get their work out there and noticed, I embarked on revving up my own rather tired website at www.SallyWrightQuilts.com.
My friend Sherry Kleinman's new web/blog was particularly inspiring in that it morphed the functions of a blog and a website into one.

When I looked at it critically, I realized that my site had been out there in the ether for four years and in comparison to many It looked tired and dated, overblown, too wordy and as my work has progressed, really in need of an edit.
So on Monday I started and by this afternoon it is up (and working which is a blessing!). My back has a permanent spasm from long hours in front of my laptop and my husband says he has missed me, but it's done!

I changed the colors and the banner to be almost seamless with my Blogger design I added a photo of me on the home page - very brave of me.... I took out a bunch of older work that bored me, added some new pieces and some photos of charity quilts in hopes of inspiring other quilters  to spend some more time for others.

I edited a lot of the overblown and unnecessary text, changed the fonts and a new crisp white background. I even added a slide show to the home page unfortunately it took me two days to find one that I could deal with, place the code properly and could be viewed by Apple devices. I know I do most of my surfing on my IPad. Don't you?

I use an ancient version of Dreamweaver that I taught myself years ago, but i always get really useful advice from an old friend who is a professional website designer in Virginia - Thank you Jill Probst of Classic Web Design for helping out when i get in trouble!  "HTML for Dummies" comes in handy, too.

Now that I've sold an important piece and done some private commissions I need to think of myself as more of an art professional and hopefully the new site is a step in that direction. to that end I changed the title of the site to Sally Gould Wright "Textile Artist", abandoning the quilt word. The current thinking is that not identifying oneself with quilts is friendlier to art collectors.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. Comments both good and bad are absolutely encouraged! So now I'm going back to the Studio to get down to work....