WOOT! Website Organization: Achieved
Whufffff.
Remember last year when I obliterated my old website? I got really frustrated with the worlds of Advertising, Online Entrepreneurship, Operating Within the Matrix--heck, even the majority of disability and dain bramage hubs telling me that I am a big, fat failure.
Fuck that.
Yeah. I know what I look like on paper. I know what the markers for "success" are. I do not care. So I overhauled my website from "This is the marketing hub for where you can buy things from me and hire me and find my arts," to "Yo. This IS my art."
Now, granted, I was fully aware that this initial overhaul was basically a huge, rainbow-puked, Jackson Pollock splatter-factor of all the stuff I do. At that time, I decided not to care about that either. I just had to get it all up on the wall so I could see what I was working with.
Then it needed to ferment.
And so it sat.
In the meanwhile, I did a bunch of other stuff while letting it stew in the back of my mind. This is often my creative process. It is the nature of my work flow.
I see all my main passions as a constantly rotating Wheel of Fortune:
Dance
Writey
Fighty
Nature & Woo
Passion & Curiosity
Art Therapy/Healing
All the practical crap I need (and strangely like) to do
Depending on any deadlines coming up, depending on the season and weather, depending on my injuries and energy level, depending on my mood and current obsessions...this wheel is in constant motion, spinning around or slowly revolving to put certain categories on top.
The last couple weeks have been all Practical-Practical-Practical.
Physical Therapy to reclaim everything I lost while healing from the latest injury
The annual detailing and maintenance of my car
The fall cleaning
A massive purge of outdated operating systems via EMDR
Finally finishing the overhaul of my website
Funny story, and the perfect example of how the Muse works in my life. I had just finished almost every new component I built on that site when I accidentally nuked it. I have no idea how I did that. But it was just...
GONE.
All that remained was the final photo at the very bottom of the homepage - my hands holding the magnolia.
THAT WAS IT.
I rebooted the site. I rebooted my internet browser. I rebooted my computer. Nope. Gone. So I had to call tech support. Thankfully, it was a one-minute fix, a RESTORE button I simply had to be directed to. WHEW!
But then, while he had me on the phone, Tech Guy said, "So...I see that your site is not optimized for Google. Would you like me to walk you through that?"
BOING???
Um...YEAH!
(Yes. I'm all about the CAPS right now. Yes, I've had my coffee today. Yes, I actually am an all-dancing, all-singing, walking, talking cartoon character.)
Proof.
Annnyway...I've been doing avoidance maneuvers on SEO for a year now, mostly because I knew that my site was a rainbow-splatter of WTF-dom. A gazillion links. A gazillion videos. A gazillion theories and ideas and projects and arts and...
Just...
STUFF. Everywhere.
I considered putting a big "Please Excuse Our Mess" sign up at the top, but I never did get around to putting it up and then I forgot about my website.
Purposely.
My mom is a quilter, among many other arts--she's also a multipotentialite. So's my dad. (Yes, they're aware of what they unleashed upon the world. They're not sorry.) Sometimes when a project frustrates my mom, she will literally wad it up and cram it into the trash can under her sewing center. (No nasty garbage in there, only threads and scraps.)
She leaves it there to ferment for however long it takes. She lets herself be mad at it. She lets herself be disgusted at its offensive nature. She lets herself do something else while her creative mind works on it in the background. Eventually, she takes it back out when she knows what to do with it.
She has taught me well.
Yes, yes, at long last, the Rainbow-Hued Elemental Cats have all been herded. The mission (should you choose to embark upon it) has been stated. The navigation is (hopefully) clear.
(If it's not, please do let me know.)
Let it be known:
Color Coding is mah friend, yo.
Now it can be yours, too.
Seeing the entire map of my System laid out in Alchemy, color coded by Element...that was a relief to no longer feel like such an unsuccessful cat-herder, flapping my gums in alien gibberish nobody but me could possibly understand.
I do still have one major frustration with the site. One of these days when I'm rich & infamous I shall hire a web developer to help make my darn phone version as nice as the desktop version. That's one of--no, it might be my primary frustration about building my site on Wix because I know squat about website development so I don't know how to access the actual code and tweak what I need to.
Where I really notice it is in the Elemental Portals. See, in order to stop my site from being bogged down by those 6 portals, each with its own page, flavor, mission and a gazillion links, I decided to house them in the blog, not on the site itself. The desktop versions purr nicely--at least on my desktop. The phone versions? Ehhhhh...not always so pretty.
Whatever.
Today it is #GoodEnough. It gets the point across, even if the Perfectionist is over there in the corner with her clipboard, docking my site with her red pen, snickering at the visual layout's burrs and misalignments, and giving it the eyebrow. (No. The bad eyebrow.)
We know. We are perfectly aware and yes, it rankles.
Today we are satisfied.
So poke around. See what catches your eye. Feel what calls to your heart. This isn't a shop with its handy one-stop buttons and a class scheduler. This is the online version of my home, and those of you who have ever been to my house know.
It's a rainbow in here. It is pure, intentional, organized chaos with a gazillion meditation altars that are always changing. My closets are organized by element, with the costumes mixed in with the clothing because, around here, the line of demarcation between them is blurry. This is the studio:
As you can see, my home is basically one big art studio/healing temple.
Now so is my website.
Maybe you're not aware, but my mind pretty much NEVER stops, until it crashes into heavy, restorative, organizational sleep. *I* pretty much never stop creating, exploring, moving, imagining. One of my oldest nicknames is "Hummin'bird" for this exact reason.
And yes, that nickname comes with official sound effects, like the winding up of a hyperactive, flying toy:
"Woi-woi-woi-woi-woi-WOI-WOI!"
*explosion noise...*
My Elements System of organized chaos with all my focus altars, vision boards, color coding, and the anal-retentive, systematic flow where each Element builds upon the ones prior...this is how I get anything done with the Jackson Pollock splatter-factor that is my mind.
It is one of the only ways I've found to get one toe onto communicating the iceberg's tip of what I carry in my heart. It's been difficult all my life, and art has always been the only way I've ever felt like people have sorta understood my alien language. (Except my mom and a few of my heart-friends who operate and communicate like I do.)
Then Dain Bramage happened and bashed my executive functioning, organization, sequencing, and the communication center of my supercomputer. So the way I set up my environment is CRUCIAL to my health and my ability to function inside the hurricane of color, sound, ideas and sensations constantly swirling inside me....much less function out there in the world.
It's taken 22 years for me to start sharing what's really inside me beyond dance. Welcome to my multifaceted art studio. Welcome to my healing temple. Welcome to my home.
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
--UP NEXT: SAVAGE DAUGHTER - Heraldry, Heartland, Home & Howl
--OR: All my writing about ELEMENTAL ALCHEMY
--EXPRESSION, INNOVATION, CREATION
--The general HEALING category. It has subcategories on:
--THE NAVIGATION TABLE OF CONTENTS