Evolution of Websites

For all y'all who want to see more of what I've been doing, with a few more pictures and a few less words, you should know that I have a website! I entered the world of personal composer website around 2006, when I decided it was time to get my professional act in gear, having seen other composer's sites like Nico Muhly and John Adams, so I hired a friend to custom-make me a website. I got a great discount from my friend, he gave me a one-hour tutorial, and after that I had little to no idea of what I was doing. But it had a darn good brand identity, and a snazzy color scheme, so I was proud of that! And all of my work was in one place: my blog, my compositions, my collages (at the time I was doing more works on paper and not jewelry design), and updates about performances. I thought it was so super new-fangled that you could go read about a particular composition and click a link to hear a sound sample of the piece. Nowadays it seems the norm to have audio and video embedded everywhere, a slick interface, and of course, a seamless connection to Facebook.

Things got complicated with NathanHallWebsite1.0 of course. Trying to edit HTML without skillz is just a hot mess 'o characters and numbers and %nbsp%. I'd try and change a heading and my text would fly off the page. I'd try and change one word to bold and all the red and grey backgrounds would turn purple. I ended up with a website just barely holding itself together.

Now, thanks to a few tech-savvy friends to fix the back-end server details, I have a new site run off of Wordpress which makes everything fairly straightforward again. There's bright and organized pictures, a pretty handy interface to change the design, and I can still use audio and video in the same ways. I do wish for my own web developer one day, where I can just hand things off to him or her (or robot?). But for now, I hope my efforts continue to keep me a little better connected to the bigger world out there of people who might be interested in what I do and supporting my work in so many ways. Let me know how you like the new nathan-hall.net!