Greetings,

I had forgotten just how much work had gone into our previous site. The coding itself is not difficult, but there are many details involved in improving the site’s overall search engine rankings in terms of SEO.  This does not necessarily mean a dramatic change in the ranking as far as Google is concerned; we all know about the changes to the search engine’s algorithms that favor sponsored sites – paid advertisements dealing with sites far removed from the actual topic have replaced our former top ranking – but we would still like to do as much as we can to make ourselves visible on the web without searching through countless pages.  I guess time will tell as to our success in that endeavor.

So far, I have managed to make changes to the top level pages, have added to the top level menu, and have spent several days slaving over the keyboard to optimize the hundreds of images that comprise our portfolio in the hope of restoring our site to its former beauty, if not to surpass it.  There is quite a long way to go before we are able to bring the site completely back to life, but much of the preparatory work has been completed.  With luck, it will not take too long before all the pages are complete.  We hope you will continue to visit our pages to see our new developments.

Until Next Time,

MV

Greetings!

It has been some time since our site was online; our former web hosting service sold the company, and the new company’s changes made it impossible to receive email or to update the site in any comprehensive fashion.  It has taken me over a year to find a new web hosting company that I could rely on.  Time will tell if I have made the right choice.

Sadly, our old site could not be imported to the new host, for whatever reason, so I had to put my web designer hat back on and get to work recreating all the content.  This mean a good amount of time working with Photoshop and other programs to optimize the many images on the site.  The upside is that the site will perform better in terms of responsive design on different types of devices, which our site had some trouble performing in the past.  Another improvement is that I removed commenting from our blog, which cuts the amount of ridiculous spam sent to our site by half.  In the future, I’ll be using our server settings to restrict where our site can even be seen, which will reduce the amount of foreign intrusions into our blog, as well as cutting the abuse of our email.  I’ve kept the overall look of the site, as I am rather proud of its aesthetic, but now everything will look and perform better.  These are key for a small, family-operated studio such as ours.

We hope you like the changes, and will visit us for inspiration and hopefully commission our artists in order to create new works of the hand painted furniture and functional art that are our specialty.  We’ll update our blog to keep everyone informed of our progress, and hope you enjoy the fruits of our efforts.

Until Next Time,

~MV