I have a friend from high school. In fact, we played music together, though mostly we were in different bands. Dennis graduated and went straight to Art school: Paier and Ringling, and has supported himself through is art ever since.

In recent decades, he’s traveled the art circuit of shows in both the Northeast and in Florida, showing and selling his work from canopied booths. But COVID-19 has altered that reality and the shows are no longer taking place. So Dennis decided to shift his marketing online, develop a quality e-commerce capable website, and promote himself from there. He chose to build his site on FASO – Fine Art Studio Online – and you can view it here.

I have great respect for Dennis, as a friend, an artist and a musician; so when he goes somewhere, I tend to take note. I was so impressed with the clean, professional look of his website that I had to devote some energy to my own.

I investigated several artist portals: FASO, Saatchi, Art Storefronts, etc. and landed on FASO as the best of the bunch. I started a free trial and began to build a site with them. That’s where I got into trouble. Their back end was old school and clunky. As one who has always self-hosted my websites and built them from scratch in WordPress, the FASO interface was just too restrictive for me.

So I decided to take what I already had (a self-hosted WordPress site) and simply bring it up-to-date in look and capability. It’s taken two weeks (and the work isn’t quite done), but the result is what you are looking at now. I think it’s quite an upgrade! And I thank Dennis Stuart for the inspiration.