25 Days... and Counting

Lapsang Souchong tea in the New York skyline mug, the ticking of the clock (how appropriate!) for morning music. Siyeh Glass Resource Center opens in 25 days. We are still in mid-construction on the hotshop equipment and haven't started the beadmaking classroom or the retail space. Today I finish creating my order form for Bullseye (a spreadsheeting I will go, a spreadsheeting I will go, heigh ho the merry-o, a spreadsheeting I will go!) and finish filling it in to see what my damages are from my initial order. They will not, I am sure, be... small.

Over the weekend I registered a new domain for the resource center website--siyehglass.com. I have decided to follow Bullseye's model and keep separate the websites for Siyeh Studio and Siyeh Glass. I had really wanted to have just one website, but I couldn't figure out how to meld all the news from the studio site (new galleries, new work, etc.) with all in the info from the resource center site (classes, items for sale, now items, book info, etc.) and get them to mind their elbows as they jostled for prominence on the front page. So I looked to others in the glass world who have the same dilemma to see their solutions. As I was afraid, the ones who are artists with a thriving resource center business either have great resource center websites or great art studio websites. I didn't find a good example of both. Keeping everything up-to-date will clearly be an issue.

Then I went back for another look at the Bullseye Glass and Bullseye Gallery sites, and it all just became clear in my mind. Each of my sites needs its own clean, crisp presence, but they also need to feel connected, linked, related--two parts of a whole instead of two different sites. Oh I don't plan to use the same layout template for both, but they should both have similar logos, similar background colors, font and layout. If you look at the Bullseye sites, they both have white backgrounds and grey text/image boxes, and they both convey the same clean, modern, complete yet minimalist impression. Both sites feel up-to-date and complete--understandable as they are maintained by someone whose job it is to maintain them--not, as in my case, to maintain them, run the store, teach classes and make the production work...

Oh this cold is taking a toll on both my writing and concentration abilities! But I will try to persevere through the rest of this post. Apologies in advance if it is more disjointed and makes less sense than usual.

As I surfed the templates at RocketTheme (they make great Joomla templates--I used a RocketTheme template for my Siyeh Studio site when I redid it a couple of years ago), I was initially seduced by Moxy--the template for September 2009. It's colorful, sexy, and sings to me in the same way the Dimensions template did when I got it. But this morning I came to my senses. Yes, it's beautiful and sophisticated, but it's not really the best match for a storefront site--even though it has the new QuickCart integration. A much better option would seem to be Mynxx... and that's enough geeking out on website stuff for the morning. I am in full Shiny Rock Syndrome (if you open that link you'll have to scroll to the bottom to get to the salient bit) and am going to have to rein myself in hard to get through the next 25 days intact and on time.

Now off to Commerce to get metal work!