a new home, built on squarespace

The house of birds, in the arboretum behind the wintergarden

Welcome! I'm really happy to finally have a place for my website, blog, portfolio and shop to be at one address, along with a new event page to share local art related happenings and so much room to grow it boggles the mind! I picked Squarespace to build my new home after about a year of research and starting trial accounts on many services, Zenfolio, Shopify, Photoshelter, Bigcommerce, Wordpress, etc. and also trying (one more time) to mold my existing Smugmug website into what I needed it to be. Squarespace won and Smugmug has been cancelled. 

So far, it's the first time I have ever had FUN creating a site and the first time I haven't used Dreamweaver to build it. I wanted clean, light and modern, but totally customizable and that is what Squarespace is. The design interface is simple, yet in-depth enough to tweak every tiny detail. Check boxes, sliding bars, drag and drop, tools to edit images, and the ability to insert code only if I want to. I fought and wrestled Smugmug for 4 years trying to get it to look the way I wanted it to, even with customizing code and css in Adobe programs it refused to do exactly what I wanted. I'm a visual person, so code, while interesting, is the last thing I want to do while creating a pleasing visual experience. It's been so much fun that the last two weeks I've chosen to work on this in my spare time and at night over any other relaxing activity. 

And, I'm still working on it, partly because it's so fun, so any feedback or suggestions are welcome. I would also love to hear your personal experiences with other site builders and services and the pros and cons you've encountered.

In the meantime, I'll just be here . . . playing, and probably rearranging things just for the sheer fun of it!