Web design is not for the faint of heart.

So It has been quite a while since my last post, and for any of you that read this you may or may not know that my wife and I welcomed our first child back in April. Needless to say, priorities change.

Well now that we're seasoned veterans in the field of parenting, I thought I should at least attempt to get back to making art and doing the sorts of things that go along with that, such as self promotion. My newest venture has been to construct myself a website using Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash, which I assure you has been no small undertaking.

Years ago, in a previous life some might say, I actually worked as a web designer at two different venues. In my first job as a web designer my boss decided that we needed a Flash Developer and that for some reason that person would be me. In the end he gave me about three weeks to do nothing but teach myself Flash for eight hours a day, five days a week, and I got pretty good at it. That was, however, about six years ago. In web-tech-time six years may as well be six decades. The Flash MX of old only resembles the Flash CS4 of today in the way that a child might resemble their step-grandfather... My second job as a web designer was really not a design job so much as it was a job where I used terrible pre-existing graphics to create terrible new things. I learned how to code html pretty well in that job, but coding html is not like riding a bike. You cant just pick it back up after years of not having ridden.

My current motivation to create a new website, admittedly, was somewhat artificially created. I was sort of recommended by a friend to another friend as a person who knows (knew) web stuff pretty well. This resulted in me getting a gig teaching a two day web design workshop to the Grand Valley State University Art & Design Dept. Senior Seminar class. Needless to say I needed to brush up on my web skillz, and the best way to do that seemed to be to make myself a new website. And so, to make a long story long, the fruits of my labor can be seen here:

michaelingold.com

It is by no means a masterpiece, but I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. It is a work in progress, and I'll be adding more content over the next few weeks, but the majority of the work is done, and that is a relief