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“A story must be told or there will be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.”
J.R.R. Tolkien in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981)
Producing artwork, while keeping a website (actually several websites) up to date and current is terribly time-consuming especially if it isn’t your bread-and-butter – and you are doing it part-time. For a couple of years I have been struggling to keep the old “Worlds in the Making” site up to date and fresh, and no doubt my failure has been noticed. Every now and again I see a spelling mistake and some glitch that I have missed on some or other page and even worse I stray across pages that are “under construction” – and have remained that way since I redesigned the site in May 2008…
Then I get e-mails from some dear and well-meaning friends and fellow artists telling me that this and that link isn’t working, or the title of that page is incorrect, which makes my own sense of guilt even deeper. Suddenly it dawns on you that slowly but surely the website is dying along with your own dwindling interest and energies.
I started to dabble with blogging about 3 years ago, as well, and have had a modicum of success with writing blog posts, designing and tweaking templates and trying various plugins. I gravitated towards WordPress because of its ease of setup on a Linux-based host. My church website was one of my first attempts, and I added the ubiquitous BryceBlog a while later. Then late in 2010 I was approached by my wife’s painting group, the Western Cape Christian Artists to set up a website for them to promote one of the exhibitions, and a dutifully agreed to help, but the same sense of dread rose up as I started to lay out the website structure and came to realize that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demands of the website administration.
It was then that I started reading some articles on Photoblogging and realized that with careful planning and a bit of tweaking, WCCArtists.com could run as a photo blog of sorts and that lead to discovering what WordPress could offer – it is, after all, a good CMS platform. I was surprised, when I got even better results than I expected, controlling static and dynamic content and having a blog as well. But what sold me was that I could manually change it’s content without touching or learning any code, letting WordPress’s CMS and the MySQL database do all the hard work for me!
I therefore decided that it was time that “Worlds in the making” cease being the dinosaur that it had become, and to become a photo blog! I think the results speak for themselves!