New Website

Hi All

I had a thought this morning, that I should probably be spending most of my time working on my new website, but as it,s the summer hols I've spent most of time with my youngest trying to sort out their bedroom. Who would have thought that it would have taken 8 hours a day to go through all their stuff and rearrange the place. While we were doing this we came across some old art work stuffed behind the beds and wardrobes -belonging to my youngest, who immediately said "throw that" didn't even think twice. Only one did she keep! her Viking boat. Perhaps we should all take a leaf from a child's book, children don't seem to view their art the same way adults do. Children don't think about these pieces as works of art that are precious, they just see them for what they really are -  something I did but can do AGAIN!!! only this time better.

While I was there I found sketch books from my eldest who is a little more proficient in her drawing and I don't think there was a clean page in it, the corners where all turned up, fingerprints, smudges, doodles at the side of a drawing that have no relation to the piece, and tears through the some of the pages. Again no fear - of the white page and no fear of getting it wrong. And when it isn't right they have no fear of starting again!
So how many of you can say the same?
Which brings on to my point about about the website - after having lost the original work of the web site, I started again from scratch, only do the same thing again, by that I mean, I worked for hours on a page then forgot to save it properly. so when I went back to it the next day I could find it and had to start again - for the third time. Now going back to the child book thing above, having lost the work for a second time I decided that I was going to re-illustrate a child's book that would then become the website and now have a theme to it. I chose Alice in Wonderland, always one of my favourites and if you do the research in to it's author it's even more interesting.
So you know that sketch book challenge I gave you - why don't you try taking a book and creating the illustration s to it???

learning curve

Hi All
I've spent last couple of days trying to my head round using Adobe Dreamweaver Cs4 to rebuild my website.
If you haven't seen my website it's www.orchidarts.co.uk this was the first website I ever built and i did all by myself using XP frontpage. I was very proud of myself getting this far all on my own.
But more than 18months ago the original pc we had XP on self terminated and fried itself. leaving me with no access to my website and no way of uploading more work, so it's sat there for all this time waiting for me to rebuild a new one.
Over the past few months I have designed the pages on paper so I have a clear idea of what I want. The only problem being is that i now have Vista and dreamweaver to work with and that means sitting for hours/days/weeks teaching myself how to.....
So this week I have got as far as getting the background and main photo for the homepage sort of figured out but not exactly as I pictured it. The next step is to figure how i get things hot spots working and being able to label them. All this technical stuff stops me from painting as much as I like but if I can master this I'll be very happy!
If anyone has any tips on getting it done faster please let me know!
As I want some animation on my website now going to go and draw on some acetate cells, that should keep out of trouble till tomorrow.