Whitehorn Logo

Home
My Portfolio
Screen Shots of sites I have designed
Screen Shots of more sites.
Screen Shots 3
Why You Need a Website
Why Whitehorn Should Design it
What will this Cost?
Things I need from you to work on your site.
You are Here
Client Comments
Ways to contact Me.



For Artists. Small businesses & Individuals

I have been a full-time profession artist for more than thirty-five years, as a custom jeweler and as an award-winning sculptor. Because I hate paperwork, I had been keeping my records on an elderly computer - 1988, 640kb ram, no modem, no hard drive, ms-dos only!! But it reached the point where I could no longer get software for it and it couldn't be upgraded.So in 1999 I bought a new computer and discovered a whole world of websites out there!
I immediately realized that I wanted one for my sculpture, and after browsing the web for a bit, I could envision my finished site, and I had definite ideas about what I DID and DID NOT want it to look like:

I DID want
— a site with the classic elegance of a museum or a fine art gallery,
— a site where navigation is simple and every page can be found quickly and easily,
— a site that loaded as quickly as possible, considering that my site would be heavy on the graphics and photos because it IS a visual arts site.

I did NOT want
— loud backgrounds that would drown out my art,
— garish buttons to detract from it,
— a navigation scheme dependant on blind guess,
— for my customers to have to impatiently wait for several minutes (or more likely, leave!) while each page downloads.
— and I also did NOT want anything that jiggles, wiggles, or jumps - they may be cute the first time, but by the fifth time they are very annoying instead, and they slow the page download time considerably
With these ideas in mind, I set out to design my sculpture website.
And I learned that . . .  
— the web page templates that I saw were NOT the layouts I wanted,
— the graphics programs that came with my computer weren't designed for professional quality graphics,
— I didn't like any of the thousands of backgrounds I looked at on various graphics sites,
— I spent days looking at thousands of buttons and other web graphics without finding what I wanted,
— most of the people calling themselves web designers might be good technically, but in early 1999 they knew very little about artistic design,
— and that if I really wanted to have the website I envisioned, I needed to buy good graphics software and learn a whole new art.

The whole idea was exciting, and I could see the site clearly in my mind's eye, but I still had no idea as to how to build it or post it.
At this point my daughter (married to a technical software designer) gave me a crash course on the basics, and turned me loose to play. And my first site, www.CWhitehorn.com was the result. I have made minor changes to the site since then (like making my own buttons instead of using something from a clip-art site) but the overall look is the same.

Soon I was studying the technical aspects of website design, learning about Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and have been upgrading my computer, my programs, and my knowledge ever since.

     ^ top

Home | Portfolio |Screenshots 1 | Screenshots 2 | Screenshots 3 | Why a Website | Costs | Why Whitehorn |
About Whitehorn | What I Need From You | Client Comments | Contact Whitehorn | Feedback
|

This website and all graphics and designs ©2006 by Carolyn Whitehorn and Whitehorn Web Design