Wednesday is Web Day

Coffee in a skyline-shaped mug but with a big red poinsettia on it instead of a city, music is "Killer Parties" by the Hold Steady, Dave thinks it's off Separation Sunday. I don't know what it is (and it's kind of mopey, I have to say) cause the music is on cd, LIVE FROM KAVARNA! Now to work.

So what is the point of a Siyeh Studio website? Why not just have one great big site with a constant streaming outflow of information—blog posts, photos, articles, publicity--everything currently on Siyeh Studio and Glass Incarnate? Nope. Won't work. The photos I want on Siyeh Studio are finished work—not experiments, not my sweetheart swap pics, not the studio cam. Speaking of the studio cam (no, I don't have one), I want a live studio cam. Drop in, listen to the music, see what's happening at that moment in the studio (is it shipping? Is it grinding? Is it CREATION? The problem is I'd need to mount the camera on me (like the light on a miner's helmet) as I move constantly from room to room doing different things… But back to the website.

Maybe the reason I keep ending up with a never-finished website is that I don't really know what I want it to be when it grows up. I slap some haphazard things up and plan to do more later. Well boys and girls, 'later' is now. Got to, got to, got to GET IT DONE. The postcards are going to start hitting galleries TODAY and the curious might (hey anything is possible!) pull up my website to check me out.

Every time I have sat down to work on the Siyeh Studio site in the past couple of weeks I have been lured away by the Glass Incarnate site. I *know* what I want up there and I keep slipping into putting it up. When I do determinedly focus on the Siyeh Studio site I get lost in some little arcane detail like how to put up a Google maps version of my gallery locations instead of a static list. Who cares?! Just get something up now. Something. Anything but an interminable "Under Construction" page.

So what to put up on Siyeh Studio? Well, an obvious answer is a somewhat manipulable slideshow with examples of all of my work on the front page. Draw them in. Also on the front page should be a listing of upcoming shows, awards/publications or other news. I was accepted to the Decatur Arts Festival for this year today (yea!) so maybe I need to have a retail corner to let people know when I'll be doing a retail show or having an open studio.

The items in the last paragraph all feel like the vaguely fall under the heading "news", and isn't it a nice coincidence that my Joomla template has a Content item type called "News"? Also on the topic of potential "news"… What about all the donations I do? I don't take a tax deduction on them (for some reason the idea of doing so makes my accountant shape her fingers into a ward against the evil eye) so what about putting in a plug for both the event and my altruism by writing up a news blurb each time I donate a piece and include a picture of it with details about the particular auction?

So on the front page so far, upcoming wholesale, upcoming retail, upcoming charity events to which I have donated work for an auction and a slideshow. Four is a good number. I like four.

What other kinds of content? Well, an artist bio is a good thing. As is a statement of techniques and materials. The there is the work itself. I need pictures of the various series and color ways within them—and for gallery clients I need a password-protected price list and ordering mechanism. I need a contact me form for inquiries, and I could use a registration form for eventual e-mailings. Last for the moment, I need a listing of all the galleries that carry my work (in a Google maps form would be nice, but I can wait).