TheLeeLawrie.Com Blog

Welcome

Greetings Lee Lawrie Lovers!

I have created LeeLawrie.com to serve as a virtual museum paying tribute to the life and sculptural work on architectural sculptor Lee Oskar Lawrie.

The reason this is a virtual museum, is that Lawrie’s sculpture is on buildings all across our nation, and beyond. Consequently, it is impossible to collect his pieces, because they are all permanently attached to buildings, and many of them are colossal in size.

If this is not your first visit to my site, you may have noticed a different look and feel to the site. I have rebuilt it.

While the site has been live since 2006 or so, I’ve never been satisfied that it was free from dead and/or broken links. I know how frustrated I get when I go to a site and hit a link, only to have it go 404 on me. And I must apologize for having had so many bugs in the site. This is nobody’s fault but mine—because when it comes to dealing with style sheets and HTML coding—I am completely illiterate.

Historically, I have used Adobe Dreamweaver, a product called Serif, “Website in a Box,” and finally, I tried Wordpress with Bluehost as my hosting company. Bluehost does offer training and/or some guidance on learning Wordpress, but it is expensive, and help sessions over the phone were capped at 25 minutes each.

Therefore, since all of my past endeavors were unsuccessful, (financially) last November, I hired a trusted web consultant to find me a usable platform—one that would not require ANY coding. Ms. Camille Church did some research for me and came up with Squarespace as the hosting company, and she created the skeleton of my website, which enabled me to add my photos, text and other content to the site, myself.

Among the challenges I faced in starting the website over from basically a skeleton, (adding the content,) I have been addressing areas where I fell short in the past.

The challenges include:

Implementing proper SEO into the site;

Creating the store to enable direct selling of my books and other products; and most importantly

Monetizing my content. In the 15 or more years I have operated this site, I have never earned any income from it.

The world seems to be full of small websites, that run with only a person or two behind them, yet many of these have realized their potential to earn some money and at least pay for themselves.

Access to my site is free, and I plan to keep it that way. But I may end up developing more video content so that I can have a YouTube channel that users can subscribe to, which tends to lead to some degree of monetization.