Design a Website, Really?

We’ve written about collaborating on our art, but did you know that Pixeladies is actually a business partnership, too?  In the business part, we don’t collaborate as much as divvy up the jobs.  Fortunately we have, as our dear friend Weslee calls it, complementary skill sets.  Kris and I like to say Kris is the talkie and Deb is the techie.  Or Kris is the writer and I am the, well nothing alliterative comes to mind, bookkeeper.  And why I do the talking on our class videos is a mystery to me.  Maybe Kris wanted to make sure I really had a voice.

Really, we both are pretty confident that we can learn whatever we need to know.  Such is the case this spring when I, Deb, volunteered to redo the website for my Cloth in Common group. Kris is our website person, so I guess I thought her knowledge would just rub off on to me. Wouldn’t that have been nice?

Cloth in Common

Cloth in Common is a group of 12 artists from around the world. We each make our own quilt based on a theme or prompt one of us provides.  Twelve artists, twelve prompts. Two months to complete the quilt.  Each round lasts 2 years.  I joined last June for round two.  Our overarching theme is Community. Each of the 12 prompts somehow relates to community.  We started with Identity and moved on to Reflection, International, Biodiversity, Neighborhood, Cooperation and Sharing, and now Gardens, Parks and Green Spaces.

The Cloth in Common Webite

We share our quilt exhibitions online, so I wanted to upgrade the website to something that would show our work by prompt and also show each artist’s quilts together.  I’m the techie.  How hard could that be?  It’s just a database of images, right.  You should be able to sort them in various ways.  I forgot one part. Kris does our website—and it has been 20 years since I took those HTML and Javascript classes at the local junior college (Thank you, Jamie!).  And you really don’t write code for a website anymore.  You use a package like WordPress and use themes, and widgets, and plugins, oh my! We’ve come a long way, baby!

After many chats with our Internet host, theme creators and plugin designers, not to mention many late night Zoom meetings and calls with Kris (Thank you, thank you!),  the Cloth in Common website went live. Now I had to help these twelve amazing artists transition from a very user-friendly blog, to one that, well, takes a little more work.  Remember that part about the artists being from around the world.  Well that means we speak many languages.  English (Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and US versions), German, Dutch, Korean and Japanese.

 

Fortunately most of them speak English, but communicating computer-speak is challenging.  Especially to Mikiko from Japan—whose English classes are currently closed due to the Coronavirus.  But guess what? Kris really is a talkie, and a multilingual talkie to boot. So she graciously hopped on our zoom call, unprepared, and explained a few things to Mikiko in Japanese.  How’s that for friendship? So I hope you take a look at the Cloth in Common website. There is a lot of amazing work on view.