Well, I haven’t been blogging much lately, instead spending my evening hours designing and building a web site for my wife Deanna’s metal and fused glass sculpture.  And last Friday we finally launched the Central Park Studio website!

The site only contains a few of her many works, some of those which I had easy access to or already had workable photographs of.  We plan to photograph more and put up new pages every couple of days.

I haven’t built a website in a few years, and learned a few things:

• Now I understand better why people have been clamoring for transparent png support in IE.  IE7 supports it, but I had to sniff browsers and do tricky tricks to get it working in IE6.
• IE is much more forgiving than Firefox.  A small error (in one case a missing quote) affected IE not at all, but set Firefox on a serious tailspin.
• Up front investment pays off.  I generate the site from a small number of XML files using XSLT.  This allows me to quickly add new artwork, as I don’t even have to create a page for a new piece, just add a bit of metadata about the piece and the images associated with it.  Once I got this working well, adding new images was an almost exclusively Photoshop task.
• Photoshop drives me crazy.  And rocks!  For doing lots of image adjustment, color matching between images, sizing and so forth it does a great job.  I really wish however that the adjustment controls weren’t all buried in a submenu.  Have I overlooked a handy image adjustment palette for one-click access to all the adjustment tools?
• Buying a domain name and hosting space is easier and cheaper than I would have believed.  I set aside a day for it, and the site was up and running, including email, within a couple of hours.

Anyway, check out the site, link to it ;-), and send me comments.  I’ve only tried it on IE7, IE6, and Firefox.  I’m sure there are many improvements that can be made (I’ve already got a list going).  Enjoy!