A couple months ago I made the probably-too-hasty decision to jettison a domain that I’d been using as a catch-all ‘personal brand’ for nearly ten years, LunarBistro.com. I had several reasons for that, but the primary one was simply that I wasn’t using it in the way that I had always hoped to, which was as a creative hub for all of the projects I had going on – comics, stories, games, commissioned art, illustration-for-hire, design, etc. When I used it to promote my comics, it seemed redundant since the comics each had their own sites anyway, and when I was using it to promote the games, I didn’t leave any room for anything else. Meanwhile I had this IndigoKelleigh domain just sitting there not doing anything. I felt like some new focus was needed.

So, I spent a couple days figuring out how to whittle back my ‘internet empire’, and how to realign my online presence to better showcase the illustration work that I wanted to be doing more of. I decided to make IndigoKelleigh.com my ‘contract illustration’ site, since that was to be my ambition, and began just forwarding all of the LunarBistro traffic over here. I rebranded my facebook page, my tumblr and twitter accounts in an effort to unify everything I do into one site. I’ve even been posting comics here, and would be posting new info on games, if I had any currently still in development. And in the meantime I’ve been able to successfully utilize IndigoKelleigh.com as the artblog I always wanted LunarBistro to be.

But lately I’ve been noticing a failing of the new design. With my homepage being basically a call to hire me for illustration work, and the blog page acting as a gateway to most of the rest of the content that I’m posting on a weekly basis, it now takes two to three clicks to get to ANY of my actual creative output, which is kinda the whole point of having this website in the first place. While I’m posting the archive of Chutney Point comics, smaller comics like the Li’l Mummy comic I posted last week are getting lost. It’s good that small comics like this will always have a home on the Comics page, but if that’s the only way to find them, then it’s a concern. And if I start another comic while Chutney Point is going up, it’s going to have the same problem.

I went back and took a fresh look at my notes from when I decided to consolidate everything under IndigoKelleigh.com now that I know how that structure is working in the real world. I think now I’ve come up with a good plan that will work in the long term as well. My goal is to have a website that allows for multiple ongoing projects to each have their own themed sites, while keeping smaller ‘orphan’ projects under the basic umbrella. To have a place to point people who are interested in hiring me to illustrate for them, but to keep it separate from my more personal ‘brand’.

SO! I’m going to spend the next month or so figuring out how to make this work. I understand that WordPress has the ability to create ‘networks’ of sites that all run off the same install, but can publish to different subdomains, and with different themes. So what I’m thinking is that I’d have the main IndigoKelleigh.com for my portfolio and contact info, but the artblog would become LunarBistro.com. Projects like Chutney Point and Games would get their own subdomain, and all of the LunarBistro sites would share some common structure and widgets – similar layouts, one twitter feed, links to the stores, an Appearances calendar. It’s possible I might even be able to achieve this by just using Category templates, but that might be beyond my WordPress skills.

Anyway, I’m excited to jump into yet another redesign of my site, and I thank you all for your patience while I’m figuring this all out. I’m really hoping that this redesign will be the last major functional rearrangement of my online stuff, and that any changes from now on will be either adding new projects, or purely superficial tweaks.