For people who don’t visit my website often, the changes might not be very obvious. But for regular visitors, things may seem a bit strange. Things have changed, but it’s hard to tell what exactly. Why did I make changes?
My first website
As you may know, I’ve got a lot of hobbies and things that I like. My very first website, back in 1999, started with the domain ‘tabbymay.com’. It was only about my music and through that website I got bookings for live gigs.
But years later, in 2015, when I rolled into the world of coloring for adults, and through that into the world of mixed media, things changed. The old website, although reformed a lot since the start, remained, and I started a new website on the domain ‘tabbymayart.com’. So now I had two websites. One about my music, another about coloring and art.
From 4 back to 1
I actually had 4 websites… since I had both websites in English on the .com extension, but I also had the exact same websites in Dutch on the .nl extension. In the end I felt overwhelmed by it all, and a few years back I decided to keep just one website.
Since I didn’t do a lot with music and hardly ever touched my guitar at that time, I thought it would be best to delete the original TabbyMay websites (.com + .nl) and let these domains redirect to TabbyMayArt.com. Same with TabbyMayArt.nl.
So far so good, I had only one website, in English, and focused on coloring and mixed media.
Changes of interest
Then the pandemic came along early 2020. I started playing guitar in weekly Facebook live streams, to entertain people during the first lockdown. But because of my aversion against social media (read more about that here) I posted everything on my website. And my website became my spot on the internet where I would write about whatever I felt writing about.
And that’s where it became a bit blurry. I had no more focus, and many people that liked what I did when my site was about coloring and art, didn’t like that I also posted my song recordings and personal blogs. I had to do something, but didn’t know what.
Damaged website rebuilt
Two weeks ago we had major problems on our web server, causing my website to be irreparably damaged. My husband came to the rescue, and built my whole website again in less than two weeks time. (Oh and by the way, in the meantime my domain had changed. I discovered the .art extension, registered TabbyMay.art and that’s where you are right now, reading on my new website on the new domain, yeaaah!)
Well, a couple of days ago I came up with some plans for my webshop (if you like coloring, you will definitely like what I’m up to, but that’s for another post!) and then my husband said that I needed to decide what I want with the website. Music and coloring… to me it’s a perfect combination, being two things that I enjoy doing, but for visitors or customers it may be confusing or even annoying.
New plan
So here’s what we did: we made a copy of this website on TabbyMay.com and at this moment we’re working on making that my musical and personal ‘web corner’. That’s where you will find my songs, my personal blogs and everything I want to share that is not related to coloring or mixed media.
On TabbyMay.art, right here, you will find everything about coloring, coloring materials, mixed media, art supplies etc.
And to return to where this post started, that’s what you may have noticed, that everything about other topics, has been deleted from the home page and the menu. The posts are still there, for the time being, but in the near future we will delete them from this website, The posts have been deleted, they are now only be available on TabbyMay.com. Both websites are pretty much a work in progress, but we’re making progress every day!
Well, that’s it for today. I will not record a Tabby Reads video for this one, since I wanted to post this blog ASAP.
And I’m curious what you think about this change. Was it a good decision to split up into two websites? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading.
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