Recently, I decided to reboot my personal website. It was mostly cobwebs at this point and many of the plugins I had used had faded into obscurity at some point over the last decade. I deleted everything that was broken, put up a couple of placeholder pictures, and went on to one of my five million other projects.
Last week, someone I met asked if they could purchase some of my artwork. Cool! It’s been a while. I handed her a business card so she could reach me later. Later that day, she wrote me in confusion to say she’d looked at my website but couldn’t tell what kind of things I did or what my style was. Whoops. That was embarrassing. So I rushed around putting a minimal website up so at least a visitor would know who I was. I wound up missing my Monday posting deadline for Polu Texni while I was working on that.
I don’t like to give a poet less than a week of featured time, so I thought it was a good time to do something else instead of the normal poem to make up the rest of the week. I decided to do a round up of artist links from business cards I’ve picked up recently. I sat down to look at all the websites, and guess what? Out of the half dozen sites I planned on showing, only one of them was functional, professional, and gave a good idea of what the artist did. The rest of them were out-of-date, contained no pictures, had broken functionality, or were missing all together. I had picked up all of these business cards in 2018, so over 80% of artists I met recently made a bad impression and potentially lost a customer. Wow! The good part is that it made me feel much better for having committed the same sin. At least it’s a common mistake.
I’m going to hang on to the link to the good website for another day so I can introduce it with “hey, this work is cool” instead of “hey, this guy’s website isn’t broken.” For now, I’ll just remind artists and writers if you are passing out business cards at art shows or cons, make sure what you are linking to works and gives a good impression.
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