I’ve had a few cool quilting opportunities come my way in the last year — like being part of the Modern Quilt Guild’s Quilt of the Month program and working with Craftsy on a kit. And while I don’t plan on turning my quilting into a business anytime soon (or ever), I’ve been looking for more ways to both share my own work and hopefully advertise my graphic design skills to other quilters who could use some help in that department. (Gotta make use of my digital media studies M.A., eh?)
So, in the week before my first Quilt Market experience in October, I decided to throw together a portfolio site! I’ve owned sarahruiz.com for years but hadn’t actively maintained it in quite a while. It was long overdue for a refresh and some redirection.
Sometimes I find myself wishing I had time to build my own website like I used to, but alas, I don’t — and to be honest, website technology has far surpassed what I’m capable of these days anyway. (Ah, the good ol’ days of HTML, formatting with tables, and basic CSS! Ha!) I turned to WordPress instead and after trying several different free portfolio themes, I found this one that had the features I was looking for and a very simple design.
I put together a quick logo (based on a mini quilt I made earlier this year) and wrote entries for most of my quilt patterns as well as a recent graphic design project. There’s an “about” page of course, and a link to my Craftsy shop. I’m not interested in starting or maintaining a separate quilting-only blog, so the “blog” link just points right over here to saroy.net.
I have a few more things I’d like to tweak before I call it complete:
- Go back and edit most of the entries for each project to make them a bit more polished. I want the portfolio site to read more “professionally” than a blog.
- Beef up the “about” page to include more specifics and/or examples about what kinds of things I can do.
- Add a more prominent link to my Instagram account.
- Possibly add a couple more examples of my graphic design work, even though they wouldn’t be quilt-related.
I’m also trying to decide whether I should put ALL my quilts on this site, or just stick with patterns (or otherwise particularly notable creations). I’m leaning very heavily toward the latter, since I can continue rely on this blog to maintain a full record of my finishes.
Overall I’m pretty happy with what I was able to produce with only a couple hours of effort! I’d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think!
p.s. I’m doing a 31 day blog writing challenge!
