A Step Toward Legitimacy

When I started this blog, I was very new to the blogging scene.  In a way I still am, considering how much the blogosphere has exploded and changed in the last couple of years.  Back then, I was eager to get going.  I had two blogs going simultaneously with the same content--one on Wordpress and one here on Blogger.  I was told that it might be a good idea to limit my blogging expressions to one particular outlet, and I chose the Blogger platform in part because of it's connections with Google.

Since then, I've been able to read up a bit more on the nature of blogging, and I've realized Blogger is just one platform in an ocean of blogging options...  Many many more options than I ever knew...

"Little Red Riding Hood" Wearable Art Piece

But I stuck with my guns, and I've tried to make this blog robust and interesting.  I couldn't (and still can't, honestly) afford to get my own "website" with a blog as a component part, compete with my own shopping cart mechanism and so forth.  I opted to use free options and services to facilitate my branding and web presence, and focused on creating a body of work and developing my fair and festival booth dreams.  Ultimately, I figured a web store for my art wasn't really going to help me much if no one wanted to come visit it.  And getting out in the real world was what I needed to do in order to draw people to my website.

I figured having a Blogger site (and Etsy and Artfire sites) would suffice as an online presence, and the combination created a venue for me to express myself, share my work, and have a storefront as well.

What I sacrificed was a "professional-looking" brand that was cohesively tied together.  Looking back, I could have had this with Wordpress, but to really take advantage of Wordpress's options would have had to educate myself in HTML/CSS and essentially spend part of my "dedicated art time" maintaining my website.  Google's Blogger platform takes care of that for me at the sacrifice of personalization.  And I've been able to live with that, knowing I had other things I had to develop that were more important.

But finally I've managed to do a couple things that are the beginning of making my Blogger blog a bit more like a real website...  I've changed the name to www.relishedartistry.com, to begin with.  I've made some cosmetic changes to the column on the left that makes it look less like a blog and more like a website with a blog component.  I even acquired an email address without the "@gmail" tag that makes it seem a bit more legitimate.

In the future, I plan on implementing a three column template that makes it even more like a website, adding more "pages", possibly implementing a storefront of my own, and essentially "redesigning" it to appear a bit more like a legitimate artistic website instead of just blog.

This is a big step for me.  I can now change my business cards to include a more legitimate sounding website address and email, which goes a long way to providing credibility and authenticity to my status as a professional artist.

In the end, I may end up switching over to Wordpress, but that's in the future far away--I have some self-schoolin' to do before I want to make that decision.

But even these minor changes make me feel a bit more real.  And that goes a long way to inspiring confidence!

Until next time, Live Life with Relish!