Warning:  really long!

My old blog, http://cmguajardo.blogspot.com has been cached by Blogger even though I deleted it a few days ago.  Be careful what you post – it could be there forever even if you don’t want it there anymore!

Back in March, I decided to make the move from Blogger to a paid self hosted Wordpress blog after testing out several different platforms including, Vox, Live Journal, Typepad, Movable Type, Sitekreator, Weebly, Wordpress.com (which is hosted free and not to be confused with wordpress.org) and a few others.

Why?

When I first decided to really give being a studio artist a real shot after dropping out of the graduate landscape architecture program at UCD in 2005, I didn’t know what blogging even was until I joined a virtual multi-disciplinary art group called Wet Canvas (WC for short) in January 2006 and didn’t really know how to navigate my way around all the different available technologies.  WC has a ton of information for artists and I immediately started reading the “internet strategies” thread since, intuitively, I knew that this is a huge part of being a 21st C artist.

Not being completely confident of my longterm blogging or independent studio artist future, I looked for a FREE blogging platform.  Time would be my only investment.

I initially signed up with MSN Live Spaces (bundled with Qwest – my ISP) and then later opened a blogger account because that seemed like the most popular platform at the time.  When I first started blogging, I really was new to internet technology even though I had been browsing the ‘net and reading my email for years prior.  Slowly, I became more proficient and as I visited more and more blogs, I would find applications I wanted to implement on my own blog and started recognizing those that worked well in both design and function.  Later, I became dissatisfied with the canned templates, and went in search of “skins” so that I could customize my blog which ultimately led me to taking some free online HTML courses to understand how it all worked together.

Gee, is it really Thursday already, because it feels like the week is just flying by! Here in Colorado, we have been enjoying warm spring days for the past few weeks; that was until Mother Nature decided to remind us that she’s still in charge. We woke up to about 4 inches of snow in the Denver metro area this morning. I really can’t complain because come summer we’ll be crying for moisture.

My goal for my blog is to post every 2-3 days, and this week I let 4 days stretch between posts…. Not my intention, but what can you do? I could backdate my post to make it look like I posted yesterday, but I won’t. It’s not like I don’t have anything to say either. I have a blog post saved as a draft with future blog topics all ready to go.

Anyway, let me get back on topic. I wanted to share my glaze test tiles that came out of the kiln last week. I had tested a high calcium semi-matte base glaze recipe from Mastering Cone 6 Glazes, page 89 in the book, and then added variations in color: 3 to be exact. I also re-tested the cone 6 Chinese Blue Green recipe, which compared side by side with my tests from college, turned out perfectly! My ceramic’s mentor, Mary Cay, is coaching me through my glaze testing and is having me use Robin Hopper’s method using the “color progressions pie” from page 187 in The Ceramic Spectrum.

Do you remember back in high school or college math, thinking to yourself, “when am I ever going to need to use this information again?” Well, I had to dust off my algebraic capabilities from my brain files in order to calculate the glaze recipe once my tiles came out. I was scratching my head, wondering how am I going to get the colorant amounts for test tile #5 from the pie?? Algebra to the rescue. The algebraic formula is explained on page 190 of The Ceramic Spectrum.

In other news, I subscribe to an online newsletter called Practical E-Commerce and there was a really good article today on keywords and how to choose wisely to optimize your website’s ranking with search engines. I’m paying attention, because when I google my name, my blog comes up first and foremost, but not my website. I have two domains pointing to my website, http://cynthiaguajardo.com and http://coloradoartstudio.com, and my website doesn’t come up on the first few pages of my google search. Now my blog comes up #1 and my blog does have a link to my website, but how many people are going to poke around to find it?

If I search for pottery, ceramic pottery, ceramic vase, handmade pottery or other vague search terms, my site is no where to be seen. So, the question is how can I choose and narrow down the focus of my keywords to help people find my website? Here’s a link to a free keyword analyzer that will help to narrow down that search. Obviously, hitting the streets, networking, word of mouth will help people find my work, but my quest is to help my website stand out anonymously on the Internet. The article advises that webmasters use narrowed down specific search terms. In other words, pretend to be one of your customers. Think like a consumer of your product. What would you search for?