I have had a website, www.kemmestudios.com, for a number of years. The main reason for the website was so those who collect my oil paintings, or who put in a request for a fundraiser, would have the ability to see what I had available. It was not necessarily to sell art, but was more for convenience. Prior to that I would have to email JPEGs of my paintings (of course only 3 at a time, so I would have to send a crap-load of emails to 1 person).
I read the book, Idiot’s Guide to Frontpage, and created the website from scratch. I hosted it on Go Daddy.com and let it be. I only updated it here and there when paintings were sold or donated. However, over the years I have forgotten my web design skills so the thought of doing any drastic changes to the website (re-adjusting tables and cells, etc) seemed too daunting of a task.
Then I started this blog in July of 2010 and have been loving it ever since. I change the look of the site all the time. I love the flexibility and ease of using a WordPress blog format. So then it finally dawned on me…why not turn my oil painting website into a blog? I could then add articles related to art whenever I wanted to. I had years ago created 3 newsletters with some articles in them. I could simply transfer those articles into posts for simplicity of reading. Then, I can add more posts at will.
So the question became, how do I do that? There are some different theories on that. I know many will keep their Go Daddy account and use the WordPress templates provided through Go Daddy. But I started to think about pricing. The cost to register a URL here at WordPress.com so you can remove the <dot> wordpress out of the URL (kemmefitness.com used to be kemmefitness.wordpress.com) is nominal in comparison to paying for the hosting and domain registration through Go Daddy. But there are some drawbacks from what I hear. For one, I will lose the ability to control every aspect of the website, since the themes in WordPress don’t allow you complete access to change whatever you want. There are also some terms of use with WordPress related to advertising, etc.
When it came down to it, I decided that I love the convenience of using a pre-made WordPress theme, and of course, the joy I get with saving money. I hope I made the right decision. Let me know what you think.
Either way, check out my newly remodeled website (now blog) at www.kemmestudios.com
Pete
http://robmalcolmjones.wordpress.com/
Thanks for posting the link. I will definitely take a look at it! Thanks for sharing this!…Daniel
Thanks for sharing this! Interesting!
Thank you for sharing your wonderful thoughts with us. You’ve made some really helpful statements and I appreciate the time you’ve taken to write this.
Your style is really unique in comparison to other people I have read stuff from.
Many thanks for posting when you’ve got the opportunity, Guess
I’ll just book mark this page.