What a disappointment...

Let’s complain a bit! An illustrator’s website struggles, plus my Art supply haul is out!

Hi all in 2023! How do you feel about the new year? Are you excited and full of energy? Or maybe you feel like you’re dragging with you some of last year’s stress and worries? In both cases, I hope you’ll stay with me over here throughout the year, and together, we can talk about all art-related things, creative lifestyles, and work!

The Menu for This Week

🌳 My website sucked!

🌳 My first Art supply haul

🌳 New Year! New …

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Let’s complain a bit!

An illustrator’s website struggles

It’s common for artists and creatives to take their time (years!) to update their websites and online portfolios, because there’s always something else to be done. Keeping the web up to date is always being pushed for later. I’m no exception to the rule, and the website I showed you in one of my YouTube videos from around 3 years ago, was never really properly updated.

So it is pretty crazy when I tell you that in the last year and a half, I changed my website not once, not twice, but three times. Yes, you’re reading it right! My website looked outdated, and I wanted a change and a proper update, so first we gave it a facelift, but it didn’t seem enough. My web was held by Squarespace at the time, and there were some options that I felt were missing.

As you know by now, we had an idea muy loca of building my web from scratch, this time on WordPress, which we did. And it was a nightmare….

Where do I start? WordPress resulted to be extremely complicated to use, and the overall user experience was a definition of frustration. I bought an expensive premium template to use as a base, but it was a nightmare to install and customize. To give you an idea, you need a plug-in for everything, and once you get them, they don’t work. The only plug-ins that work have to be paid for (25- 125 euros per each), so I ended up paying the same or more than what Squarespace page maintenance cost me (46euros/month)

To have my shop up and running, I installed a Woo Commerce plugin, but publishing one single product in my store required setting up millions of different options and features I didn’t need, but had to be installed either way or otherwise, my products wouldn’t get published. My WordPress site was failing me a lot and getting buggy, which made it look iffy, with elements falling out of place. All of that defeated the purpose of having a new, super cool and modern website! Another thing I noticed was that my page wasn’t indexed correctly. Even though I was careful with the CEO, I noticed a decrease of 50% in the traffic to my web coming from searches. But wanna know what the final nail to the coffin for me was? Finding out that WordPress placed its own ad on top of my welcome page without me knowing or consenting to it. This was when I said Bye Bye.

… and below is what WorPress SEO decided to add under “Work” in Google search!

I know some love WordPress, but sadly that wasn’t my personal experience, so I went back to Squarespace (it’s not sponsored at all), and in no time, we built a new website, the one you can visit now.

There are still some things that need finishing and uploading, but it looks so much better and is fuss-free anytime I want to update it. It’s also the space where you’ll find all my Procreate brushes and my Notion template, to keep you organized in this 2023! That’s the one I mentioned in my YouTube video and the one that helps me tremendously stay on track with everything.

Check out my New-new Website

www.asiaorlando.com

Art Supply Haul

A video from late 2022 is finally coming out in early 2023!

And it’s a fun one, all about art supplies! Imagine the best art store in your city closes, and you feel the urge to restock & grabbing all your art supplies yourself, with your hands, rather than ordering everything online… That’s when you grab your art shopping list, hop on a train and go to another city to go back with everything and film a very first shopping haul! #fabuloso

I bought a lot of cool supplies, nothing flashy, all very useful stuff for an artist. Some of the things I show you in the video are my go-to’s, and some are new materials I saw and got, expecting some awesome results!

I’d love to hear what your most used art materials are in the video comments and also see if you’ve tried out the things I bought!

Also, if you read the last post of the Creative Draft with my Xmas gift ideas for artists, you might remember I wanted to purchase some stuff from the list myself. Those I had to order online, as in most European countries, they’re hard to get. I’m very excited to try out those supplies that are highly praised by artists all over the globe!

I’d love to hear your thoughts about art stuff under the video! See you over there!

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New years goals

What are you going to read this year? .. a few book ideas

I have so many of them this year, a bunch for my personal life and a bunch for my professional work! One of the smaller and more fun ones I have is to read more, and I’d love to see what books you enjoy and like reading.

So if you’re on Goodreads too, I’m leaving mine here so that we can be bookworms together.

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