Effort

Creating and maintaining a website requires several things of its owners including a project vision, time, energy, technical know how, personal motivation, attention to the project and commitment to making it happen.



Art can be spontaneous, and I believe that a website can be a sort of art project. A website can be many things: a business endeavor, a hobby, a collaboration, a promotion of a person, a place or an event. A website can be a joke or a public resource.

Contrast

Connie has resisted technology while I have embraced it. I spend much of my leisure time with a computer or other pieces of technology. I wonder if I may have missed out on other things because of my attraction to technology. We are a study in contrasts in this regard and I am certain that our differences in this area will help to create more interesting results.

Unspeakable Behavior

Okay. This computer stuff is oddly exciting for me. It is important that you know I'm considered a ludite in some eyes. I don't have tv. I barely have a computer. I almost never answer the phone let alone check my voicemail. Let's see, no vacuum cleaner... Technology challenges me on every level of my existence and for most of my life I've resisted it's presence in my space.

Intentions

Connie sent me an email last night seeking some clarification on the process of making a post here. She wrote:

Apparently I created the blog account by accident yesterday - either the computer here or the site was having trouble so I wasn't sure I even created an account.... nor do I have any idea what my name or password or any such thing is...
So, how the heck do I post to the blog?

This means that the next post you see here will most likely be hers.
A note about some if the images that I have been posting here: Several years ago Ms. Vandeveer published a series of zines under the title Looking for Anne. As a way of introducing Connie and to make the site more visually interesting, I plan to continue to post some of these snippits of her older words and images.

Yesterday I played with the appearance of this site for a while and I set a series of glyphs as the background. I was not 100% happy with the results so I moved back to the current appearance. The best thing about this Blogger interface is how easy it is to change the appearance of the site without worrying about changing the content.

Tools

I sometimes spend hours browsing the images at Flickr. Your Yahoo account will sign you in. It sets the standard for online photo repositories.

A basic tab interface for website navigation is located at Dynamic Drive.

Specificity

Connie and I had an excellent telephone conversation this evening. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of thought and detail that she has put into this project already. Ms. Vandeveer talked to me about her vision for her websites, and we concluded that there are two projects in her mind.

• A professional and polished website showcasing her photography and her philosophy of image making. The purpose of this site will be to display her photos and solicit new work.


• A website that is more free form, encouraging collaboration between herself and several of her contemporaries in various art forms ranging from visual arts like photography to healing and meditative arts like yoga.

We spent some time hashing out the appearance of her photography website, and she mentioned to me that her company will be operating under the name Reverent Strange Photography. Connie has a variety of images that she is proud of taking, and she wants to narrow the field of roughly 200 images to a more usable set of about 75 photographs. Connie articulated that she will categorize images into groups such as portraits, living spaces and more experimental images. We discussed web elements and the tabbed interface that she wants us to use for navigating the images on the site, as well as other overall appearance issues. I was very pleased to hear how much detail she brought to the table regarding the layout and sizes of the images. It was clear that she has spent a significant amount of time thinking about these issues.

We also agreed that this blog is a good starting point for her collaborative website and I encouraged her to sign up for a Blogger account and to make a post here. She agreed, and I believe she will join our narrative by the weekend. In addition Connie will call Office Max and Kinkos to find out what the cost would be for having 75 images scanned and burned to CD for use on the Reverent Strange Photography website. In addition she is working with her friend Shanna to develop her logo and business card. After working very diligently to pay off her credit card debt she said that she was not excited about charging costs to her credit card.

I promised to look into the web interfaces that she had pointed me toward and to look at the coding and scripting. I am considering AJAX scripts such as lightbox to help display some of her content although I didn't mention that in our conversation. We also agreed that although we might exchange emails and words here that we would speak on the phone this weekend.

I am very exciting to be working with Ms. Vandeveer.

The Beginning of a Wonderful Collaboration

Connie contacted me recently and was enthusiastic about creating a website for some of her work. We have been playing phone tag recently, but below are a few snippits of our email conversations.

I look forward to this creative process with a woman I have the utmost affection and respect for. This process started on January 7 of this year when Connie wrote:

I'm ready to take you up on your offer to start my website, you still up for doing it? I have the layout for my business card but I don't want to print it because I know I'll want a website/email thing to go with it. Whatcha think?

I responded very positively the next day and we have been playing phone and email tag since. I was excited to get her most recent email where she wrote:

I just did an initial sort/stock of every photo in my house.... Funny, I feel as though my life has just flashed before my eyes. Turns out I have more than enough photos to get started:) I was actually a little worried.

So, I have ideas...lots of ideas. Mainly what I'd like to say right now is that I'd really like this to be a collaboration - truly - between the two of us. I'd love for our ideas to fuel and build on each other. I want the website to reflect our friendship as much it shows my personality and my photography.

I'd like to put work on the website that friends have done so I'd like to have links to their websites (the few who have them). I'd also like to have a link to some of my favorite photographers.

I know I'm really excited right now and many of my ideas will never see daylight or are too big for this project but the juice is flowing.

With our eyes open wide and ready to begin the adventure we start this blog.