I’m now officially the webmaster for the Olathe Visual Artists Association. I just finished moving their brand new website live. I’m kind of proud of how it came out.
I’m now officially the webmaster for the Olathe Visual Artists Association. I just finished moving their brand new website live. I’m kind of proud of how it came out.
Karen B. Jones - Illustrator 
Looks nice. I assume this is a volunteer gig? In any case, it is good exposure.
I did notice one error: On the “Artwork for SCBWI”‘ you didn’t include your name–(no need to be so modest). Also, in same section, artist should be plural.
Yeah, it’s a volunteer thing. My reasons were somewhat selfish, though. I did it because, as an OVA member, I wanted to link to their site, but it embarrassed me to do so. It was a really bad site. If you have a VISUAL ARTISTS site, the site should be VISUALLY appealing. Not necessarily flashy, but professional and attractive. Their site really wasn’t. At all. It was like a Geocities site from 15 years ago.
I don’t want to be mean to the former webmaster. She’s a very nice lady and she tried really hard to do what she needed to to make it work. She took a Dreamweaver class and updated things in a reasonably timely manner. But she’s a pastel artist, not a web person. And she knew it. She’d actually been asking Rob to give the webmaster position to someone else for about 6 months when I joined. She was THRILLED when I volunteered.
It was a perfect match for my skill set. Setting up a WordPress website? Pft. Easy. Just some effort to track down members to provide me with SOMETHING to put on their member’s page. As a bonus, it helped me learn everyone’s name, which I’m generally HORRIBLE with.
It was really sad that the website was so bad because all the artists in the group are talented. Some of them even travel all over selling their originals and prints at art shows. And those of them who have websites, most have nice ones. So, the group having such a bad site only made the members all look bad by association. THIS was the problem I was trying to solve. And I believe I did. Now they have a website to be proud of.
And thanks for catching my error. It’s fixed now. 🙂 If you catch anything else, let me know. 🙂
The mission of Chuck Baird Foundation (CBF) is to promote and empower emerging deaf visual artists, by featuring them in the CBF Art Magazine magazine. Their high quality work deserves to be recognized and appreciated by the deaf and hearing community at large as they make a first bold step in their careers as artists.
I knew there was a deaf school in downtown Olathe, but I hadn’t heard of this organization. Thanks for sharing.