I glance out the window and discover squirrels copulating while standing in the platform birdfeeder. Sigh. At such times, the only possible refuge is haiku.

Squirrel sex among seeds–
The artist thinks: “Perhaps I
should get out the hose.”

Meanwhile I am trying to comprehend the vast mystery of the website set-up James has chosen. It involves PHP. A lot of it. It’s a morass of…stuff. I don’t think I’ve drowned in completely alien phrases so dramatically since that section of the SATs that had trig.* The end result will be a website that’s VERY easy to update, and hopefully easy to navigate, but it’s just not gonna be pretty–it’s gonna look like an on-line art archive, not like some carefully composed web jewel. Sleek may be the most I can hope for, and even that’s probably a long shot. I may be stuck with utilitarian.

But I am resigning myself to this. As long as I don’t choose particularly nauseating colors, I think it’ll be okay. As people have been agreeing with emphatically in the last post, graphical doodads are all well and good, but people only care for the first thirty seconds. They’re coming for the paintings, not the web design, and as long as it’s easy to find the art, that’s the important thing.

I would love to have a really lovely website–I’ve had a few in the past that were wonderful little things–but I am simply too prolific. I can have a pretty site, or I can have a current one.

I keep telling myself this because what I’ve got so far is UGLY, and as you might have guessed from the slightly desperate tone of self-convincing, this is causing me some emotional anguish. But I know I CAN fix it. I have seen sites done this way, and while they’re still not pretty, they aren’t nearly as bad as the template I am tearing my hair out over. I just have to figure out how to do it, and it’ll be fine.

‘Cos it’s not going up until it’s no longer making me weep with despair, damnit.

*Just because it hasn’t mattered in over a decade, and I suspect it will never matter again, I am going to milk the very last drop of glee out of this–I got 1480 on my SATs, and I was proud, damnit. Okay. I can move on with my life now.