THE MAKING OF A WEBSITE
21 November 2022
Introducing you to my new website.
Hello and welcome! It took a month of intermittent work-spurts on my part and the fine-tuned design skills of Ngaio Blackwood to complete this new website and it was an interesting exercise - one that, initially, I felt would be a stressful and time-consuming chore.
It was certainly time-consuming but in a good way. I had to think deeply about how to describe my creative ideas and practice, reframe it, edit, start again, find photos, take photos, edit photos and write more text content as the words and tasks evolved. The more I got into it the more engaged I became.
Website designer and artist, Ngaio Blackwood got me started with ‘Kay’s Game Plan’, a document of five steps to be completed before she began her part. Step One, ‘My Ideal Client’ – but how would I know? most of my ceramic sculpture is sold through galleries or exhibitions and I had only a hazy idea of this ideal ‘person who fell in love with’ one of my ceramic figures.
I started with a composite of people I knew who may (or may not) be ‘in love’ with my work, backed up with some ‘ideal client’ fantasies. It felt quite a strange thing to do. I had to give him/her a name, describe their lifestyle, work or business, their interests and values, imagine what was important to them, the kind of people they looked up to …. I prefer to deal with certainties but this was largely guesswork.
Ngaio suggested that over time it would be beneficial to keep modifying my ‘ideal client’ as my understanding would grow of the personal qualities and characteristics that lead to a sense of connection to my clay sculptures. Having completed the first round of the exercise I had gained a better understanding of a potential buyer’s motivations, which of course, was the marketing intention, to focus the content on the ‘right’ audience.
Photography for the Sculpture Gallery took up a lot of time. Fortunately, in recent years I have had Florence Charvin and Charlotte Anderson take some beautiful photos of my work, of me, and my garden that has strengthened the quality of the photography and the rest were taken by me. All my available work needed to be recorded photographically and displayed with a title, price, dimensions, and for this I prepared an Excel worksheet.
It was Ngaio’s job to create the website using SquareSpace as the platform and I feel very grateful to Ngaio for her contribution; from her design nous with colours, fonts, layouts and organisation of content, etc. (that are such an improvement on my previous efforts) and are very user friendly for my website visitors - to the way she ‘managed’ me and the assignment.
The Game Plan was a process of eliciting information that I probably wouldn’t have come up with on my own and made me dig deeper. No time was wasted. We had two weeks to get this thing up and running, deadlines for tasks were arranged well in advance, there were only two phone conversations and one (video recorded) Zoom meeting to familiarize me with managing website content.
I am delighted because the website truly reflects my preferences and content. I am impressed with Ngaio’s ability to elicit information efficiently and with great courtesy.
I hope you enjoy the experience and over the moon that you have found your way to my website.
Thank you, Kay