My appologies for the lack of posts this week, its been a busy one. Number 1 issue is I am looking for a new place to live which as i am sure you aware, is a major hassle even at the best of times and often takes more time than you anticipate. So here is hoping i can get all of that sorted out ASAP.

You may remember a little while i ago i mentioned my website was hacked and i was busy fixing it up. I am still doing that and during my procrastination of doing this i decided that i also need to update my front page. It’s something i have been thinking about for a long time and wanted to incoporate more of a blog / update type feel to my website in order to promote traffic accross both sites but i still wanted it to retain the status of not being a blog and website in its own right.

I previously, had an “artnews” section which was manually via a html page edit, as well as a welcome image which was randomly generated from a selection of my recent work. Problem was it was becoming to time consuming to update the news and i found i didnt do it. Also i have lots of good info on my blog that some people might miss if they come directly to my site so i wanted to show that also.

So i decided why not incorporate all this info and have it publish on my website automatically. At belindalindhardt.com you can see i now have i have my recent work in the middle, updates from my blog on the left (i wanted to include small thumbnails but that wasnt an option) and any important news that needs to stay current for a while such as my recent profile in artist palette magazine on the right.

For my artnews what i did was create anotehr blog which is just for art news… while i wouldnt expect anyone to go to this blog on its own this blog is purely there to push information to my website. I burned the feed and used BuzzBoost to get the html and put it on my page. Formatted it and its as simple as that

Now i have that all sorted all i have to do is update my gallery descriptions which is what i should have been doing in the first place and my website will be current !!

Artists Palette Magazine – issue 62

I am really happy to announce that i have made it into this month’s Artist Palette Magazine – Issue 62 currently available for sale in Australia.

In it is a bunch of my works both coloured pencil and paintings and a demo i did when i created this Maxy’s Bubbles picture. Its really great to see your work in there and my son Max was so impressed to see himself in the magazine .

On a side note if you have come to this blog via my website or plan on visiting my website in the next few days i do apologize, i recently had a hacker get into my database and mess with my descriptions and images on my site, i am going through them all at the moment and fixing them all up ASAP.

This weekend i updated my website (AGAIN This time the update isn’t visual ,its in the functionality or what we web people call the “backend”, so for this blog post i thought you might all like a bit of insight as to how I have worked my website and how it all integrates with the way my artwork and files “tracked” or organised. So stay with me, here we go

Some of you may remember my post last year about – Keeping Track of Your Work, which details a system for the way that i (and YOU) can track artwork, files, filenames etc. and generally make life a bit easier.
I developed the system after years of working with my and other peoples files for websites etc and i know that once you have the system in place if you stick to it, it works I have had lots of people write to me to tell me that this kind of system has helped them organise their work and files and this makes me happy as i love being able to help people out this way

Before i go any further, i need to elaborate on how my website works.
I am lucky enough to have a database drive website, so here is how that works.

After doing this I went to my hubby Daniel with big woeful eyes in a nice pleasant voice saying “HONEY, Can you please…. ” (Dan handles all the database and tough technical stuff and asked him whether he would do it all for me. So, i must stop to say a big thankyou to my hubby if your reading this, who created all the extra fields i needed. Then he created the ability for me to generate a “report” of all my artworks on the website which basically spits all my information onto a html page and allows me to look up the status / or details as needed, or periodically I can also do a print out that i can refer to quickly when starting a new artwork or adding it to the site.

Here is my “Petal Beauty” all finished. I have put a couple of layers of fixative and UV fixative on it. I will do a final few coats and then i will be done. The original is a little lighter than it appears in this pic, but i think it looks quite nice i think it will looked nice framed. I am going to have to get a custom frame for this one as its a longer size than normal i might do a series of these i think they are quite nice

Last night worked on my art website, i am actually still working on it right now but most of the major work has been done. I was never totally happy with the way my gallery worked, now i have updated it and i think its more intuitive. So if you need to use up some time go over there and check it out let me know what you think ! www.belindalindhardt.com.

I have two buttons available for you to add to your website.

To add my smaller button copy and paste this code to where you want the button displayed.

And for the larger button:

For this week’s weekly smudge i had a few things in my head to give you, one being to highlight the http://www.artbizblog.com/ website which i recently rediscovered… BUT.. Maggie beat me to it and posted today, basically the same thing i was going to say. Isnt it odd how that can happen?
This also happened the other week when i posted about the Remember the Milk website and Rose commented about how she was going to post exactly the same thing as i did. I just find it so interesting that we can all be off thinking that we are doing our own thing and really we are all just following the same circles round and round!!! Anywho, go checkout Maggie’s post and the artbizsite and while your at Maggie’s site also checkout her post re: How to Juggle and Other Parlor Tricks its an inspiration and one i regularly read if i am making excuses not to get things done.

Following your Goals

Also this week: We made our mark on Katherine’s Making a Mark blog regarding my Australian Coloured Pencil Resources website. I have made a few additions to the website as the week has gone on and had other artists contribute to the site. This is fantastic i hope it grows as time goes on.
Here is the link to Making a Mark – Who has made their mark this week.

My Website:
While we are talking about websites i have finally finished my new website. wOOT!
I am still in the process of adding images to my gallery tweaking information etc. but its now live so be sure to check it out.
http://www.belindalindhardt.com/

Thanks to the hubby for working on it for me its so fantastic it has a backend allowing me to add all my bits quickly and i will be adding more to the site as we have more time available.