New Website Design

A client recently went on vacation so I decided it would be the perfect time to finally fix up my website and work on various other neglected illustration related tasks. I'll tell you about some of those things separately as some aren't quit ready to reveal yet. But for this post I thought it would be neat to look back through the years at my website design. 
            This first image is from my website back in 2008 I think my first design was in about 2005 but for those first few years I kept to this basic design of having the resume on the home page. I have no idea what I was thinking,LOL. The "logo" had it's own issues as most people couldn't even figure out that it's supposed to be a birch tree.

my updated resume with a much cleaner design.

at some point along the way I decided it would be a good idea to throw a close cropped pic of myself up on the web header. Again, what was I thinking? LOL

finally I began to get the idea when I decided to put some close cropped illustration samples for the header.

Then I eventually decided to add one larger illustration to the home page to welcome guests. So the whole site and home page was black with these bright illustrations on it as I felt my illustrations looked good on black. It took me another year or so to realize that all of my favorite children's illustrators had very light themed websites. That realization then gave me the point of view to see my own website ina whole new light and realized it is waaaay too dark for a children's illustrator website.

This past week I did my most recent adjustments to my site and now have four buttons on the front page that link directly to various kinds of art in my portfolio. I may decide to change the images for those button over time but I have a feeling this concept will work the best to help folks get where they are going. I've also updated a number of other things to make navigation easier and have lots more in store to add interest to the site. This theme is still a bit dark but much better than before. I tried some lighter colors but realized it would take a complete redesign from scratch to get everything to look good on it.

When I say web design I should be clear that I am only using a template and uploading images and using apps. There are all kinds of things I would love to do but don't have the know how or money to do. One day if I ever get rich and famous I'll have lots of fun with the design.