Thursday, September 22, 2011

New “James Gurney” Website

My website, JamesGurney.com has been rebuilt from the ground up.

The new site has ten image galleries, including never-before-published photos of the making of Dinotopia, and a collection of “teaching images.” There are lots of pencil and watercolor sketches and plenty of plein air oils.

There’s also a video feature that lets you dig into the GurneyJourney YouTube archives for videos that are everything from wacky to informative. And at last US customers can order signed books and prints by PayPal.

The designer and programmer is my son Dan Gurney, whose motto is “Information, Organized.”

The things I like best about what he built for me is that he not only constructed each of the pages, but he also created a custom control panel that lets me go in and add images and captions, change event listings, and generally tinker around with it.

I don’t know HTML coding. So before, I was dependent on begging my web person to make every little change. With his user-friendly website system, if you can blog, you can update your site.

 If you're are thinking of redoing your art or music website, send Dan an email at gurney.dan@gmail.com !


JamesGurney.com
DanGurney.net

12 comments:

nuum said...

It's beautiful.
Thanks Mr. Gurney.

Paulo
Rio - Brazil

Christian Supiot said...

Oh! Its a good change!
Hum. I suppose you're tired of answering this but... Have you some intentions to write new dinotopia's books?

Bad english, sorry.

Aaron said...

well Dan, as we say in the south, done good :) very user friendly format, and the new sidebar makes finding things quick and easy as well. I put paypal on my website, and it has made a difference, I haven't sold a ton of prints, but some is much better than none. websites are a wonderful thing (at least for artists).
http://www.asleeperart.com

Emmanuel Laverde said...

Very cool!, navigation is easy and it can connect more with the blog,
Muchos saludos James y felicitaciones al programador!

Tom Hart said...

A beautiful (and equally important!) a very functional site. Easy to navigate and fun. It was fine before, but this is a definite improvement.

Congratulations to Dan. I'm sure you're proud of his progamming talent. (And you're lucky to have that talent so near at-hand!)

My Pen Name said...

and done using wordpress, which is great software - i use it for my site it's not just for blogging - if any artist wants to put a personal site, its the best way to go -because you're tapping into a huge support community.

My Pen Name said...

Ah, i see dan uses it for his site too..

PS for any arists who want to develop their sites using wordpress here is the official site / showcase : http://wordpress.org/showcase/

the software is all open source... and free!

My Pen Name said...

sorry one last thing.. there are plugins that you can put into wordpress that allow you to post on your site and into facebook, blogger, ect, and tap into other social networks. Gurney journey is on the vast blogspot network so if someone was searching blogger about technique or something it would turn up there vs. a standalone site... but ... with non-standalone sites, be careful about posting images and content because often they claim more rights to the work than they really should have....

My Pen Name said...

OK, ONE last thing I don’t know HTML coding. So before, I was dependent on begging my web person to make every little change. With his user-friendly website system, if you can blog, you can update your site
to any other artists that might be dealing with this - that's the advantage of a 'content management system' (cms) like wordpress (there are lots of other ones - drupal, joomla (which i don't like so much) but WP is best for people who aren't familiar with coding.. once its set up (and most hosting companies have an automatic install) updating and changing pages is not much different than composing a rich text email.

Anonymous said...

Well, give your son congratulations, he's done a very good job! The layout is solid and clean, and navigation is very user friendly! Being easy to update is a nice big cherry on top!

Also, I'd like to comment on your book Imaginative Realism: after spending months looking for it and buying what I was told was one of only two copies the bookstore chain had in the entire country (gotta love living in Brazil), I have to say it was worth the effort! I'm not a painter by any stretch of the imagination, having fully moved to digital art a couple years ago, yet I found that most of the information contained in that book was perfectly applicable to my silly cel-shaded scribbles!

Plus now I finally have a book I can glue my "this Book is from the Collection of" sticker I got four years ago! I didn't want to put it on my two Dinotopia books (A Land Apart From Time and The World Beneath), since those never leave my house, but I'll be carrying Imaginative Realism around at least a few times. Gotta show it off a bit! :D

(Now to save up to get Journey to Chandara... this time I'll probably just order it online.)

Roger O'Reilly said...

Well done James. Great, clear and easy to use site.
Your prodigiousness make me feel like I'm seriously underachieving. Where do you find time to sleep?!

Pete said...

Very nice! Reminds me that I have re-vamp my website!