And we’re live!

A lot of this is similar to what came before. But will this new website platform make anything better for the visitors? Well:

– The blog itself looks better to me. Rather than having to scroll all the way through the text in the most recent post to get to the previous one and then all the way through that to get to the one before, the most recent blogs all appear on the screen in little rectangles like playing cards, with an image, a title and a little bit of text. It feels great to be able to see the important bits of loads of posts all at once, whether as part of the complete blog or a filtered blog.

– The shop window has been tidied up. Previously I had a number of pages on the website of different sets of artwork, with links to each page in the right sidebar. Now the sidebar connects you to a page that asks what medium and subject matter you’re interested in before connecting you to a page of works for sale. This means I can organise my shop window better. I now have separate pages for watercolour landscapes, watercolour portraits, watercolour figures (if I had any up for sale) and other watercolours. Previously all the watercolours were together on one page because I’d have too many links in that right sidebar otherwise, right? Look, it’s been a long week and I can tell I’m garbling. Just take a look and see what you think.

– Follow those links through to images of artworks for sale and you might notice they have no titles against them. How are you supposed to know what you’re looking at? Well, each artwork in there is now also a button. Touch it or click on it and a new window will open with the blog post associated with the work, where you can see not just the name of the work but the whole story behind it. I’m proud of this new feature.

Those for me are the biggest changes but I’m sure more improvements will appear over time. In fact, there re a couple of other interesting new features:

– Up near the top of the page you can see some social media icons. These link through to my accounts. Yes, I have YouTube and TikTok videos and they’re only a click away!

– At the end of every blog post, there are links to the next list, the previous post and to three similar posts. How cool is that?

Has anything been lost? In a word, yes. Specifically:

– I’ve lost the popular posts widget in the sidebar. Not the biggest loss, to be honest, especially with those new links at the bottom of each post tempting the reader to explore just that one more post.

– The links to other artists’ blogs has gone. But that’s more down to me than to the new platform. I want, at least for now, to get people reading more of my posts rather than pointing them them towards others’. It’s just like composing a landscape: you don’t want to guide the viewers’ eyes off the edge of the painting.

– From my own point of view, after getting used to the visitor analytics provided by blogspot, I’m not there yet with the analytics on the new platform but I’m sure I’ll get there.

It’s also worth mentioning some choices I made in developing the website. First, I used Hostinger for website hosting. I’d seen them appearing in various lists of recommended hosts and liked both their prices and the idea of daily backups. The website was developed using WordPress, provided by Hostinger.

Second, the theme underlying the site is the Arin Blog theme. I wanted a theme that (i) was blog focussed, (ii) allowed right sidebars for widgets, (iii) allowed menus along the top of the screen, (iv) allowed posts to appear as two columns of small playing cards, (v) didn’t force me into showing all the labels associated with each post (watercolour, landscape, for sale, Cambridge, tundra supergranulators, personal favourites, etc): for me these labels labels belong below the bonnet. But as well as these five non negotiables, I wanted lots of flexibility in designing the website’s look. The Arin Blog theme seems to have far, far more customisation options than other schemes.

Where Arin Blog falls down slightly is that it doesn’t like portrait format photos. Pick a portrait as the featured image on a post and it will store it as a portrait but will stubbornly crop off the top and bottom whenever it displays it as a thumbnail or at the top of a post. But I found a way around this. The BlogArise theme is far friendlier in this respect, so if I switch themes before adding a featured image or switch themes after adding the image and then regenerate the thumbnails of the relevant posts while in BlogArise, it puts uncropped images in posts or as thumbnails. I then switch back to Arin Blog and the uncropped versions are still there. If I regenerated thumbnails while in Arin Blog, though, I’d revert back to the cropped versions. If you ever have this problem, give me a shout and I can probably help you out.

Anyway, this post has ended up far longer than I was planning. Here’s the new website. Please feel free to explore and to point any artists or art collectors this way. I’m going to chill now. After five days in the zone, it’s a malt tonight, a day off tomorrow and then maybe some painting in Sunday. Cheers!.