Trying to ensure you have a presence on the web is a modern cornerstone of doing business. Unfortunately, unless you have a social media department (even if it’s just one person) or are preternaturally inclined (and young enough) to devote all your time to branding yourself, you have to make choices as to where to devote your energies. The redesign of cjcs.com was largely spurred by that balance of needs.

I’ve been operating this website, through its various incarnations, for twenty-two-ish years as I write this. How much it’s been a priority has waxed and waned quite a lot. In the past few years, I’ve shifted my attention toward things like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. in an effort to perhaps have greater reach. Unfortunately, I found myself constantly thwarted by the various algorithms that various “free” platforms constantly roll out that have the direct effect of limiting that reach to only a fraction. This isn’t a new complaint. Brands large and small are all being decimated…unless you pay.

Fortunately, I happen to have a blog just waiting for me to give it some love. Unfortunately, as had been pointed out to me on more than one occasion, the look was rather dated. It would need to be designed — hopefully with minimal impact to the archives. So…if I was going to base myself out of cjcs.com I was going to have to apply a little bit of elbow grease. (Keep in mind that I’ve been designing web pages, personally and professionally, since before HTML started having version numbers. It’s been a long time. I sort of got over the joy and wonder of it all sometime in the naughts.)

First step was practical: I needed to get an SSL so the site could have one of those nifty “https” protocol identifiers that Google now prefers for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). As a side-effect, the administrative stuff I did to make that happen also made the site quicker to load. Yay.

After that, it was a lot of playing around with different ideas and trying to streamline things so that it isn’t too difficult to use on a mobile device. Some was just changing theme settings, but there was also a fair amount of data re-entry to make things look and work acceptably. I don’t know that everything everywhere on the site is set, I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff or that some older things broke, but I’ll address those as they cross my path.

Why not go with one of the website providers that sponsor so many videos on YouTube? Well, migrating a site is never fun. Plus there were some other issues of how I’ve set things up over the years that were just going to be bigger headaches. And, well, as much of a time-suck running websites can be, I do like having the fine control you get when so much of it is at your fingertips to play with. Once a tech nerd, always a tech nerd.

What does this mean for all of those other social networks I’m on? It means that they will be getting mostly links to articles posted here instead of having content hosted on their sites. YouTube is an exception since: 1) It’s basically where you host videos; 2) Though the river is now barely a brook, there’s still some revenue to be had.

That really is the only issue with again hosting most of my content back here. Revenue. Gone are the days when a blog was a place where ad money would just flow. For many, that place is now Patreon, but after having a Patreon page running through over two seasons and having only briefly garnered one lowest tier patron, I decided that it wasn’t paying off as I’d hoped at this point. I haven’t abandoned that platform, but it has been suspended for a bit until I figure out how it can provided a value service above what I can do here.

So, that’s how I spent my winter. Now it’s on to making new art and posting new posts.

For those who want to connect, here is where you can find the CJCS version of me as of February 2019:

CJ’s Creative Studio : https://cjcs.com (the past, present, and future home of CJCS)

  • YouTube : cjcreativestudio (where the videos are uploaded)
  • Facebook : @cjs.creative.studio (this mostly focuses on professional stuff)
  • Facebook : @CJ.Carter.Artist (the original Facebook page, now it’s more focused on the artist than the work)
  • Twitter : @_cjcs_ (this is the primary CJCS twitter perch now)
  • Twitter : @_cjcarter (like with Facebook, meant for the creator, but I don’t post here often)
  • Instagram : @cjscreativestudio (the newest socnet, so not a lot of posts, yet; still getting used to it)
  • Patreon : @cjcs (currently suspended, but when it comes back, this is where it will be (I hope))

I, of course, have other accounts throughout various socnets and around the web, but those are the ones for CJCS. It’s not like you might not stumble across them.