About a month ago I did a revamp of my site.
I thought it was looking good but I designed and built it, so I would. I posted a message in an art forum for others to go take a look. Feedback required. You know the sort of thing. I wasn’t looking for a pat on the back. I was looking if others could see some glaring mistake that I had missed. If it took toooooo long to load the images. If the images were dull. If they were missing Nothing. People looked but not one comment. Now, was that because everyone thought it was perfect or was there some underlying fault and folks were just too kind to tell me.
Moving on a few weeks. An e-mail appeared in my inbox from the arts department of the local council. They were running a short, morning seminar on website building for ‘your’ arts and crafts business. It was free.
Not much comes free these days so I promptly signed up. Also they had said that the same course had been so popular a few months earlier it was basically over subscribed so they were doing a rerun . Of course then only 3 people had signed up. Great for me as I am not a people person and get nervous when there are too many folks I don’t know.
Turned up and too my horror more and more people started showing up. The e-mail had done it’s job and about another 12 people had signed up.
Ok, I was there. Then it got worse when the guy running the show said. “Right lets go round the table, name, art or craft, where your at with your website.”
Luckily for me but obviously not for the girl sitting next to me, she went first. It made me realise that other people were as nervous as me. I was sitting within 3 feet of her and I couldn’t hear a word she said. I did my bit in a wavering voice and so it moved on.
Anyway…. getting to the point with all this.
I was guilty of using the wrong font, among other things. Not making use of enough headings or using bold italics. Not writing enough information.
I used to love comic sans.
I used it in my logo as can been seen above. I thought it matched in well with my signature and it flowed. It seemed like an obvious choice for an online art site. Obviously how little I know (knew). Seems if you use that particular font trust issues abound.
As it name suggests it is good for using in comics or more to the point little speech bubbles. Not a good start if you’re trying to be businesslike and sell paintings from the site. Worse I reiterated my un-trustworthiness by splashing it over every page.
Okay so I had used that particular font for my heading, but then to compound the problem I had used verdena as my font of choice for my text. Verdena, unknown to me, is considered boring.
So I owe a big apology to all the folks who did actually bother to look at my ‘new and revamped site’. Unsafe as well as boring must have been the prognosis, lets hope I do better armed with a little more (psychological) knowledge.
New website, take 2. This time I have gone with a font that I previously considered hard and unforgiving. A font used by many a website designer. But a font that is also trusted and stable and means you’re serious about what you do.
I’ve tried to add a few headings, but need to work on the info and bio.
Only so many hours in a day and to be honest I had already spent much too long ‘playing’ on the computer instead of actually getting down to doing some real work.
So I am hoping that the new (again) site will be better.
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