What’s Next?
As I write this, I am both excited and fearful of venturing out in such a new direction.
While I have loved the creativity of designing a website and pulling together its content, I have never started one from scratch before. I am sure I have made mistakes, and will appreciate feedback from you as to what needs to be fixed.
As I “launch” at the end of my two-week “trial” period, ready or not, I’ve been setting priorities for what must be done by then. After launch, I’ll continue to add features and content.
I’ll probably have a new page called Recent Works. In fact, it will be nice to be able to create some Recent Works. The process of creating a website is all-consuming and I haven’t had time to paint during it. But I believe the website-building itself is a creative process. When not pulling my hair out after technology failures, I have gotten into the flow of adding content, checking colors, crafting words, and generally trying to create a space that means something to me, and hopefully to you.
So what is next? I will be experimenting with products – putting more images of my paintings on notecards, and maybe T-shirts and pillows, or whatever works. I’ll add more captions and titles to more of the painting images. I might add a gallery of paintings from my “water color period,” even though that is dormant right now. I will write more essays. At launch time, I’ve got about five more essays almost ready to be posted and plan to post one about every two weeks. More are flitting in my brain right now.
I will try to learn how to be an entrepreneur. After a lifetime of working in non-profits, I will see if I can handle putting items up for sale.
I would like to take this space to thank professional art photographer Chris Cicconi for taking the images of many of my paintings. I thank daughter-in-law Julie Hafer for pointing me toward the right webhosting platform, and Julie and my son Charles Nichols for last summer’s birthday present of an hour with art business consultant, Laura George, who was extremely helpful to me in clarifying my plans. And I thank my husband, Jack Nichols, for his numerous trips to the study/studio in our home to critique my work. He is getting good at it!
Most of all, I thank you for reading this. I do hope you will sign up for my e-newsletter that will alert you to the times to visit the website for new images and essays.
Carol
February 7, 2018
