Website rebuild is here!

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I have always been into emerging technology. As a child of the Gen X generation, I have a very unique view on the advancement of computers and the rise of the Internet. I got my first computer when I was around 8. I present the Radio Shack TRS-80.

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Yeah. It didn’t have a screen. You had to connect it to a TV via twin lead connectors. Those looked like this. TVs back then had screws on the back to connect antenneas and such. It’s pretty funny to think about now.

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I couldn’t do much with it, mostly code in Basic and play games like Clowns and Balloons. Computers have obviously come a long way since then. Now we’re basically all cyborgs attached to our phones.

I got into web design back in the Myspace days. Kids would pay me to customize their music profiles – it was pretty lucrative actually. I really enjoyed learning to code and I wanted a website for my art and other creative endeavors. So I started teaching myself and officially launched my first website in 2006. If you wanted to see my first website you can actually find it here – I’ve kept it up all this time! No judgement, it was my first!

Like computers, I have also came a long way since that first site. I freelanced making logos and websites for food trucks for a few years when I first moved to Austin in 2007. I went back to school at ACC and rounded out my web dev skills with a webmaster certification. I eventaully landed a web gig at the University of Texas at Austin and I am there to this day. I actually built our departmental website, take a look!

I occasionally assist small businesses with web consultation so if you are in need feel free to contact me. I also occasionally freelance branding and web development but since it is my day job, I like to spend the majority of my free time painting.

Getting a little into the technical side of things as far as how I built this site – I spent many years making custom child themes for WordPress, which back in the day, was pretty buggy. There was lots of hacking PHP and half working plugins written by questionable authors. I eventually graduated to Drupal development a couple of years ago and I vowed to never touch WordPress again.

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I last redesigned my site in 2015 using WordPress and I like to update it every three or so years. I had planned on bulding it on Drupal 8 and being super cutting edge. It turns out, I was a little too ahead of the curve. With Drupal 8 being so new (official release late 2015), no one has written a tested e-commerce module for it. I wasn’t about to undertake that task from scratch.

So in further research I looked at all the pay options like Squarespace, Big Commerce, or Shopify. They all looked okay but I didn’t want yet another monthly cost – I already pay for web hosting at Bluehost and as a seasoned web developer, I couldn’t justify not just doing it myself. Without a viable Drupal option I reluctantly resorted to WordPress and decided to try it again – it had been a few years since I had developed on it.

Turns out that WordPress, now at version 5, has improved tremendiously! Using the Genesis Framework (which I highly recommend) as my parent theme and using the Woocommerce plugin for the e-commerce solution, I have somewhat effortlessly put this site together. No hacking!

Wordpress has redeemed itself in my book and here we are! If you don’t know what any of what I wrote means and have interest in learning more, I am going to be hosting a web workshop for artists coming up soon. Contact me if you would like to know more!

Thanks for visiting!