HaNNaH West
Simple Effective Websites...with Style
It's becoming essential to have a website that promotes you and your work, provides a hub of communication between you and your clients, and gives visitors from outside your established sphere of influence an opportunity to purchase your products and services. Let's establish your online presence now so you can plug in to this increasingly dominant form of promotion and commerce. One recent client, an artist with an established local business selling prints and teaching classes, made sales directly from her new website before the sun set on the FIRST DAY HER WEBSITE LAUNCHED! My last client received a sizable commission for an original work of art through her site within a week of its launch. While I can't guarantee these fantastic results for everyone, I will certainly give your site the same care and attention to detail that made their sites effective.
Styling with cascading stylesheets (css) has revolutionized the world of website design, making it possible to create beautiful websites with less code behind the pages. This makes your site load more quickly and keeps your visitors there longer. Not to mention the advantage of making an attractive presentation that reflects your personality and the products and services you're promoting.
Personal and Professional
Though she really wanted an online presence, one client waited several years before having her website built. The reason? The inquiries she made were answered gruffly, and it seemed these "professionals" were too busy to be courteous and helpful to a prospective client. I believe in service. I want to help you create a website that's a reflection of your own personality, one that portrays your art, special talents and the products and services you offer in a manner that's appealing to your visitors and produces results for your business. To that end, I like to work closely with my clients -local and remote- in my effort to produce from code the design you envision and the functionality that suits the needs of your own business. Don't worry if you know next to nothing about computers or websites! I've been there and understand completely; I've done the work of learning how to do this so you don't have to. I can help you secure a domain name and a reputable hosting service, organize your thoughts and resources so the process of building your site is as painless as possible and completed in a timely fashion. Whether the site you need is complex or compact, we'll be in close contact as we design and build; you'll be able to review your pages as they progress and make adjustments as we go.
For Artists by an Artist
Though I've been an artist longer than I can remember, my professional life began in the mid-80's with portraits (click "start slideshow" at the bottom of the page to view the immersive gallery) of show horses and pets in charcoal and oil pastel, along with some photography and mural painting. I worked very hard to portray these magnificent animals, many of them champion athletes, accurately and with an appreciative eye, but I also discovered a talent for portraying the spirit of the individual creature, that "special something" their owners loved most about them.
Those realistic charcoal drawings led to painting in pastel, acrylics and mixed media in the 90's. With greater freedom of style and lots of color, I began to develop an ability to communicate ideas with a sense of story through my art. Eventually this made way for a successful business in handcrafted jewelry from 2000 to the present.
Building websites has taken all the experience and education gained from my early work in business administration and management and my diverse artistic endeavors over the years, focused it into a cohesive whole and put it all to work in one new artistic medium. Now I have the pleasure of appreciating the work of others as I serve them by helping them make a living at it - something I know can be hard to do. This began in 1997 with the creation of my first website. After cutting my teeth with sporadic work there for a few years, my dear friend Jennifer, a lady photographer, asked me to design a site for her. We chose an understated style which wouldn't distract from her images, and let the photos do the talking. It's been four years now and she has since worked so much, from fun family portraits by the sea to intimate, thoughtful images of pregnant women, that her site is worth looking at just to enjoy the images. The advent of css styling has now made designing websites exciting for me as an artist, and with each new project I stretch my creative skills as far as possible while staying within your budget. So even if you're well established in your locale, a new website designed with css styling will give your business a a beautiful online presence and a fresh opportunity to grow as new clients find you.
Website Maintenance and Updates
Once you launch your completed website and begin emailing friends and business contacts to announce it, making changes to your site could be the last thing on your mind. But as time goes on you may want to update your site with additional images added to a photo gallery, new text or other features. You may decide you want to follow through with a great idea from someone's feedback or a request from a client. Or a simple change in style with the changing of the seasons. Styling with css techniques makes most design updates much easier than they once were, and in some cases makes things possible that once were only in our dreams! You can contact me at any point to revise your site, and I'll help you keep it up to date so it's always working for you.