What’s up:
At one point last year, I set myself the goal of updating my website and having it ready by the end of the summer. I am happy to say that I have met that goal and am ready to unveil my full website.
Of course this doesn’t mean that nothing further will be changed or added on, but the bulk of the construction work has (hopefully) been done. This blog, which you might have noticed gradually changing its colours over the past couple months, will remain in place with no major alterations.
What’s New:
I have added an improved portfolio section where you can view my work, segregated by medium.
Under the About menu, you will find my Bio, which is similar to that in the sidebar to the right, but may be expanded and updated down the line.
It also includes the Exhibitions link, leading to an events calendar which will be continually updated with information on where I am next displaying my work.
The About menu will also (in the future) contain links to my C.V. and Artist’s Statement, and there’s room for further expansion if I think of other items I need to add.
What I’ve done:
This section might get a little boring for non-technical folks, so if you stop reading now I won’t be offended.
Originally, I was hoping to create my entire site using WordPress, the program that powers my blog, so my first quest was to seek out portfolio plug-ins for WordPress and to see if I could find some nice examples of artists’ websites built entirely using WordPress. I found some, but they all seemed heavily modified or extremely simplistic. I was looking for one that I could update easily, that would read the exif data from my images and produce titles, tags and such using that information, one that would give me a choice of layouts, and that I would not end up having to modify to hell and gone or need to be a programmer to alter. And it also had to be free. This last qualifier was not difficult to fulfil since there are so many open source projects out there. The problem was finding one which was consistently being updated and which could meet my other needs.
I didn’t find one.
My next step was to consider a Content Management System (CMS). I have used these before on a small scale and they can work well when you have a varied site like this (portfolio, blog, calendar, and future expansion possibilities). Unfortunately, the ones I had used before were stalled in development and I wanted something I could use going forward. So I examined a number of CMS’s to no avail. For the past decade I have not done much coding and learning how to customise a new CMS seems to require it these days. I might consider switching down the line, but I really didn’t see any that really grabbed me. I think the problem is that most of them are catering to businesses rather than artists, so their target audience is more interested in management and less in content.
I then considered using a portfolio system developed with artists in mind. The main drawback I came across with all the systems I examined was that most of them did not support multiple uploads. When you are setting up a portfolio of more than 10 images, you do not want to be stuck uploading each one individually. Many of them were simply photo galleries, without any real intuitive interface or add ons.
I was already using ZenPhoto for the Gammon Collection, and though it worked well for that, I did’t feel it would work well for my art portfolio. I tried other photo galleries and again decided they were not feature rich enough. I tried Stacey and Secretary and any number of CMS’s which were ‘designed for artists.’ None of them fit my needs.
Finally, I stumbled on a project called Koken. It is a fairly new project but shows a lot of promise. The developers have written their own markup language which makes creating templates a breeze. If you can code in HTML and CSS then you can customise Koken. If you even need to; the built in themes are all very attractive and usable right out of the box.
It includes a blogging tool as well as portfolios and the back end administration area looks like it was pulled out of a high-end software program. You can upload images directly from Adobe Lightroom with no trouble. Titles, captions, tags and so forth are all pulled from exif data. It is a beautiful, well constructed program that met nearly every one of my criteria. And it is free.
Once I started playing around with Koken, I was hooked. I loved the interface, I loved the themes and I loved the ease of usability. Soon, I was building my own theme, taking bits and pieces from their other themes to create my own. The only drawback I came across was the menu functionality. At the time I wanted to go live, I could only use it to build menus which lived internally to Koken and there was no way to easily integrate it with WordPress.
My solution was to build the banner across the top of the page manually, creating a fixed title and CSS dropdown menu which I could include in both Koken and WordPress. Unfortunately, this means that if I want to update it, I need to do so in two separate places. Not the ideal solution, but still doable.
Koken is still in its infancy, currently in beta version 0.9 but there is soon to be another update. I really hope that Koken becomes the CMS of my dreams and that I can build my entire website with it, quickly and easily, without losing all the functionality that WordPress provides. One day soon perhaps, but not today.
If you are an artist looking to display your paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography or whatever else on the web, I cannot recommend Koken highly enough. I consider it the pinnacle of portfolio programs and the ideal CMS for an artist just starting their web presence. If you’ve been keeping a blog already, you might hesitate to switch, but I still recommend you give it a try. I anticipate big things in the future of Koken.