Concepts for my website...

The concept of re-designing my website has been on my mind constantly lately. I'm trying to put my best foot forward to get noticed professionally and starting with my website seemed like the most logical place to jump from. As I mentioned in my previous post, I've never been happy with the quality of my current site...it's just too slow and more than one of my pictures appears to be cloudy or the scans didn't come out the way I had anticipated. All in all it was a first attempt. So when it came time to sit down and come up with what I really wanted I made lists and lists. One list of things I liked about the current site, a list of what I wanted for the new one, I had a list in regards to just things I didn't like about the site. Aye yay yay, the lists went on and on. Sorry bad joke. Anyway, when I finally sat down to visualize what I wanted for the new look...well, I had a major brain fart. I just couldn't get my brain around all of the new ideas I had and how I would incorporate them all into one cohesive unit. Not to mention...I didn't want to create something so difficult I was only going to disappoint myself in the long run if I couldn't make it work. Ultimately, my inspiration came from a tutorial I was working on. I was trying to brush up on my Photoshop skills and learning a little more on using textures, when I inadvertantly made my background. Let me explain.... I was trying to figure out ways to make my cutesy little illustrations appear somewhat aged or give them a vintage look. Really it's a total contradiction, because my little character, well to me, seem very modern. Any hoo, I started playing around with filters and wood grains, experimenting with adding fibers and what not when I realized that my simple background had turned into something resembling wooden slats. Then I started playing with colors and before I knew it had these cute cream and red stripes going along the length of my screen. So that was how my sideshow/circus idea came about. After that it's anybody's guess where the ideas came from, all I know for sure is, I was on a roll and cracking myself up along the way, hee hee. So here's a rough sketch or thumbnail of my layout and my main character, the ringmaster. I'll have more details later, but for now this is all your sneak peek allows you. Sorry, you'll just have to deal with it :)

To the left here, you'll see the layout in the upper half of the page. The new site will have links to a gift shop, my gallery, a contact page, an about me section and even a link back here to my blog. The rest of jibber jabber is me working stuff out on paper, playing around with concepts, but I doubt they'll be used at this point....I'm just running out of space, that's all there is to it.

And this is my little ringmaster. She really serves no use other than the fact that she's cute and the greeter for the website. Over the course of experimenting with this concept, her face has changed twice...her hair style at least four times... I think she's gone through three sets of costume changes and this is her second round of hats. LOL, what can I say? I obsess over getting the details right. I want my viewer to look at my pictures and go, "AWWWWWWW." Hope I've accomplished that.