This post was originally meant to go onto my work-in-progress art site (see link below).  It turns out to have been a mistake to use my name for both of these URLs of these sites, because WordPress when it gets tired and emotional doesn’t know which one to put the post in. Still, I thought it might be worthwhile to say a few words about my experience of site development in WordPress as an artist and writer.

The first blog site I ever set up was  about life in Sydney, with a focus on food and the inner west. That site is still live and you can go there easily by putting Elinor Entity into Google. It was set up on Blogger which was then one of the only options. Blogger has developed a lot since then and offers great simplicity and functionality but it doesn’t have the Website quality which you get with a WordPress blog.

So I decided to set up a WordPress site when I started studying art at TAFE. I thought I could use it to put my written work up on. But my teacher never looked at the site and wanted me to hand in written papers which I did, but I put various expanded versions and research comments on things that had interested me on the site anyway.  I am talking about this site which you are on now, annettehamilton.wordpress.com. It was a very steep learning curve and I went through hours and days of struggle to learn how to use it, but once it was set up it was a breeze.

I now have three sites live and two others I am using as practice although both will go live eventually. One is this site, obviously, which has been a delight to develop and use. I used the same template for my Writing Zone site, which I set up to manage my fiction and memoir publications. These WordPress templates are free and don’t require third party hosting or any knowledge of coding although you can of course make some modifications through the templates. Not all the free templates offer the same range of options so check them out carefully. There are hundreds of them, both sites developed by WordPress and by third parties – most of the latter are not free though.

But using free WordPress templates with a WordPress URL is kind of low rent. The real deal is to obtain your own domain name, either through the WordPress set-up process or separately through a domain name provider, and set yourself up with a paid theme and a hosting service. The domain name, the specialist theme, and the hosting service all cost money.

You can do something inbetween by setting up your own domain name through WordPress, and using WordPress themes and WordPress as your host. Or you can buy a dedicated theme. I wanted a Portfolio site so I thought I would be very clever and do that.  I thought I could put all my images up on the site, on grids, and the viewer would be able to click on each one and bring up information about the picture, such as size, medium etc. as well as any other background.

Well that just didn’t happen. I have spent hours and hours trying to make the paid theme I purchased, Qua, work properly. Only now have I realised that the kind of clickable functionality I wanted isn’t available with that theme. It just doesn’t work like that but I couldn’t see this out from the demo. Now I’m stuck with a fairly expensive paid theme which won’t do what I want. Quite often you will be told that you can make things happen by going into CSS or doing some kind of html coding. Well sorry but that’s not in the repertoire of this artist/writer and I’m not going to start paying a specialist to do it.

So I’m stuck with a kind of portfolio site, which sort of/half works but isn’t what I had in mind at all. One of these days, when I don’t want to spend more time painting and writing, I might go back to the drawing board and see if I can set up a better one.

my portfolio site

Another idea is to sign up for an Art Archiving service. Again, it involves expense, in this case an annual fee. But you can put all your paintings on it, and track where they are, whether any have been sold, prices and such.  Plus I think there is a facility for commenting on the paintings. More on this soon.