Website Makeover and Housekeeping

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The one thing I love about January, is the feeling of new beginnings.  I love to look back over the past year and start fresh with new ideas and projects.  One of the projects I have been working on is my web presence.  My main portfolio website for my paintings is at Artspan.  I worked with a professional art coach a couple of years ago when I was switching gears from photography commission work to fine art painting, and she recommended I host my website on Artspan.  She said it was the go-to hosting for fine art artists in the art gallery business.  I also started my blog on WordPress around the same time, so I created it as a website and blog with portfolio pages and information about my workshops and jewelry.  I felt having two websites at the time was a good fit.

Fast forward a few years…  I have been accepted to a few juried on-line gallery sites and I have put my portfolio on Saatchi art.  Now that I am on all these portfolio websites, I am feeling a bit spread thin and updating my portfolio on numerous sites is getting very tedious.

So… At the end of 2014, I did a summary of my art business, income stream and web presence.  I checked the analytics on all of my sites and I learned that my WordPress site and blog were getting a lot more traffic than any of my other sites. I also learned that most of my on-line art and jewelry sales were originating from Facebook posts or blog posts I shared on Facebook.  So all that hype that you can make sales from Facebook, well, in my case, is true. HA!   🙂

I had been on the fence about what website I wanted to make as my primary site.  After this analysis, I decided to use my WordPress site as my one primary website.  I did keep a mini-portfolio site on Artspan, (janellmithaniart.com) as they offer a nice affordable site for artists who have their portfolios elsewhere, but still want a presence on Artspan. It is just a few pages and will be very easy to update.

I am so happy that I got all this web decision making done! Yippee!

Over the past few weeks I have been doing some housekeeping on my WordPress site and updating my portfolio pages.  I changed my theme to the Sela theme and just LOVE it!   I think it gives my blog and website a nice clean look and it looks great on all my devices, even my phone.

I did keep my portfolio on a couple of juried sites, and it is so much more manageable.  Now I will not dread having to update my portfolio sites every time I finish a new painting! And I am just about to finish one, which I will share with you next week.

I would love to hear what you think of my updated site and if any of you have been doing some web housekeeping, too.  Let me know and I will check out your updates.

Have a wonderful, creative day, Janell

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10 thoughts on “Website Makeover and Housekeeping”

  1. Congratulations on getting your websites straightened out the way they work best for you. This is great, works as a website, plus a blog.

    I haven’t done anything on my WordPress blog in a while, but I try to keep my Blogspot blog/website updated. I can have 10 pages on there, so it works great for me. It’s http://zephyrhillfarm.blogspot.com/
    I know you’ve found me there. 🙂

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  4. I’m so happy for you, your new updated site looks nice and I love it! The dreaded cleaning is always about decisions and we will all come to a point when decisions need to be taken. The spreading out too thin can leave us with not much or enough time to actually create art, so your decision worked out perfectly. Every year I do some housekeeping as well and I always feel better after but I have never changed my theme and that is something which I probably should take in consideration.

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  5. Hi Janell, love the new website/blog design – I agree with you it looks cleaner, professional and easy to navigate. I’m with you on keeping things simple and minimizing how many sites that you have to maintain. Beautiful, welcome to the new year – best wishes for a wonderful 2015!

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  7. Love the new look, Janell. I got rid of my official website about a year ago and decided to stick here at WordPress too. Now I just have to get my domain on here when it expires at the other place. I’m looking forward to more beautiful post from you. 🙂

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  9. Elizabeth and Elizabeth, 🙂 Thank you both for sharing what you have done with your websites and online. I checked out your websites and love what you have done with them. It’s always wonderful the hear from you! Thanks again!

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