The original Art-Rageous website (https://art-rageous.net) was first published in 1999, shortly after I began teaching at a small, private boarding/day school. With an emphasis on art education–and initially created to share successful lesson plans with other teachers and homeschoolers–I learned to write basic HTML coding and manually typed the content for each page on the site, like this:
More and more lesson plan pages were added each year, and soon sections on genealogy, gardening, and other topics were also developed. At its peak, the site’s 700+ pages were receiving several thousand visitors each week from all over the world!
Over the last 10 years, however, the way that people access the Internet has changed significantly. While websites still need to function well when viewed on computer monitors, they also need to be compatible with tablets, mobile phones, and other devices.
With its 20-year-old coding, some pages of the original Art-Rageous website are no longer serviceable. It’s been hard to find the time (and motivation) to check such an unwieldy number of pages for broken links, and updates with fresh content–in any section–have become few and far between. The site–which was once a proverbial “big fish in a small pond” as a relatively early art education website–has become a very old and floundering fish in a vast ocean of art ed resources.
It would seem that the easiest and most economical solution would be to simply send the entirety of the Art-Rageous website into the 404 abyss and call it quits after 23 years on the web. I’ve certainly considered doing this, but with a couple of blogs associated with the parent site that I want to keep, and given the ongoing usefulness and popularity of some of the pages, I made a different decision–and this WordPress site is it!
As time permits, I’ll be updating and reposting pages of the original site into this new format. I certainly don’t anticipate moving all 700 pages, but site statistics data will help to determine which pages to preserve.
While this is quite the undertaking–and it’s very much a work in progress–it should give the best parts of Art-Rageous much better functionality and compatibility moving forward. Here’s hoping!
Sharon