Making a Website

I've had a fair few attempts at making a website since September, but haven't had the patience or confidence to 'officially' publish my work on the world wide web. This was mostly because I felt like I didn't have enough content that I was happy to display, but that couldn't be my excuse forever.

From my PPP blog in second year, I mocked up a website that was fairly simple, with my name in a banner at the top with four simple headers. 

I really like the idea of a grid format on the homepage, looking similar to instagram in a way, and easy to navigate. When I spoke to Teresa last week about website related anxiety, she suggested that I  divide my work into categories to make it seem like a less daunting task, and it really helped.

(Put plan here)

I used WIX to build the website, it is SO easy to use and would highly recommend it to any other website dummies like myself. It was really easy to buy a domain name too. I went to 'godaddy.com' and was so lucky to find that elliechappell.co.uk was available, as last time I checked it wasn't! 

The thing that took the most amount of time was the layout. I wanted this to be absolutely spot on with no visible design flaws, because that would look awful with me being a creative student. It also took a while to figure out how to do specific things, like creating hovers for the different categories of my work, and not to mention the about section! 

and...here it is!

I'm really chuffed with how it looks! And it really wasn't as traumatic as I'd anticipated haha.

So at the moment I have pages for each category on the home page which acts as a sort of portfolio, as well as an about page, contact page and link to my etsy shop.

This was so difficult to write. I find it really hard to get my personality across at the same time as sounding professional because a lot of people who know me find it hard to take me seriously as well as the fact that my practice is broad and I still find it hard to wrap it up in a nutshell. But I believe that I have summed myself up well here whilst not coming across as too goofy.

Things I'd like to update in the very near future:

-Branding: I've made a tiny adjustment to my branding in the fact that I've replaced the digital colour with watercolour texture in the gaps of the letters, and taken away the decorative flowers to make it look less 'cutesy'. Although I am still undecided about this. I will come back to my branding later on in the week.

-Blog: I would love to have a blog attached to my website, just something I can post daily/weekly about what I've been doing, sketchbook drawings etc so that the viewers can feel a little bit more in touch with my actual day to day life, instead of just seeing me as an anonymous person who draws pictures and posts them online.

-Social media bar: Once I've cleaned up my social media, i.e. decided whether or not I'm still going to post trashy opinions on twitter and pictures of me taking selfies with animals on instagram then I would benefit massively by linking these to my site, and posting on a more regular basis. 



There is still a lot to do but I've made a start and I'm proud of myself for just that. Please have a peek! www.elliechappell.co.uk