Well folks, here we are.

All these weeks flew by and with such speed!

They say time is a thief, but it’s really a track star, putting even some of our finest runners to shame. In this time I feel like I learned a lot about myself and my process.

I’ve always considered myself a tech-savvy individual but creating my website always seemed out of my depth for me. I never would have believed that all it would take was a few clicks and some image searching. It just felt like websites were a bit out of my depth. Although I grew up in the era of Myspace and social media sites that pushed users to edit their pages with code, I always saw it as something difficult. It was easy when I was editing my top eight to be surrounded by glitter hearts and flowers.

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(The top eight used to be a BIG deal)

But now that time has caught up to us and the semester has come to an end I find myself facing some very interesting facts:

1. I now own and operate my very own website
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2. That website has real, actionable content.
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3. I made, or (ethically) found all of the content that wasn’t code
4. And I know how to do the whole thing all over again from start to finish

https://giphy.com/gifs/life-empire-cookie-lyon-1026uGcStaInmM

Now, of course, the website isn’t perfect by any means. It’s still got a pretty basic layout that I’m dying to update! However, my website has a few key things that I’m especially proud of!

Firstly? It has my very first author bio featuring a commissioned artwork of myself that I requested specifically for a purpose like this.

I ordered it something like a year ago thinking it would be my avatar on my author’s social media, but now I have my own domain! I don’t need social media to get the word out since I have my own site! Secondly? I was able to set up a contact form!

This was the most stressful part for me, despite it ultimately being very simple. A mailing list is any artists bread and butter and I’d never put in the work before to cultivate it. But now that I’ve done it feels like I’m on top of the world.

What I have now includes a menu, a coming soon page, and my author intro page. For this class, I have posted three blog posts but have also made separate web pages. For the next few weeks, I will still be working on it and after the holiday season passes I’ll start plugging it into my social media and promoting it.I’m going to hide the first chapter sneak peek and make it something they can get emailed later to catch more newsletter signups.

Beyond the technical aspects, I feel like I’ve learned so much in this class. I learned how to buy a domain name, set up a website, and work on it piece by piece. I could go through my classmates’ posts and read them all, learning so much about them and how they approach life. I’ve also learned to go easy on myself. My constant quest for perfection has left me living a life that feels… boring. I don’t want to keep cracking away at things and be too shy to share in case there are errors. I want to own every bit of it for better or for worse. A mistake isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of a mindset. When you touch a hot stove and get burned, you don’t drop dead into a pillar of ash, you just get a booboo. 

I’m going to move forward more comfortably with imperfection one typo at a time.

My blog posts: 

To Sail the Ocean Blue

Oh Let Me Count the Ways

The Meme Dream: Our Cultural Legacy

Oh Passion, my passion, where have you gone?

To Catch the Wind

Immediacy? Please don’t rush! 

The Middle Part! Domain Expansion?

Domain Names and Some Feelings about Change

My website: VS Olivier

Thank you to everyone for your insights and company. We had a great semester this time around. Well…