NEBA’s website launched on August 15th!
To say that this was a MAJOR undertaking is an understatement. The work actually began last November, when the soon-to-be-formed New England Book Artists met for the first time at the Boston Public Library – Central. On that day, Ania Gilmore and Cristina Hajosy generously offered to collect artists’ information and images in order to create a Member Packet for our future website as well as for NEBA publications and promotional materials. Collecting and formatting this material was a labor-intensive process that involved hundreds of emails and took nine months to complete.
Then, over the course of several meetings in June and early July, members of the Publications Committee’s Web Team (Laura Blacklow, Marie Canaves, Keith Cross, Jeanette Eberhardy, Mary Gillis, Cristina Hajosy, Chantal Zakari) reviewed the Members’ Website Wish List generated from our earlier Monkey survey. Decisions of WordPress template, menu categories, domain name, web hosting, formatting and content development were all addressed. Cristina Hajosy took on the role of NEBA’s web manager due to her WordPress knowledge. Her husband Chris Burbul, a web designer was generous to donate the time to install the website and give tech support.
Originally, the intent was to unveil the website in September at our first general meeting of the fall. Cristina astonished the committee members, when she presented them with the draft of the website within a two-week period: on July 13. It was a very impressive feat indeed, and her work was both lauded and applauded. She accomplished so much in such a short amount of time, that she decided to try to finish the website so it could be launched two weeks early. SHE SUCCEEDED AND IT LOOKS GREAT!
Web Team Zoom Meeting – July 13th was a special day with the first look at NEBA’s new website.
And so at this time, we take this opportunity to thank all the committee members who made valuable contributions to the website; their ideas and enthusiasm are much appreciated. Our biggest thanks however, goes to two people: Chris for laying the foundation for the website and Cristina for populating the website with all the content, links, and extra photographic compositing needed to create this striking showcase of our members’ talents. It will henceforth serve as the public face of our organization and the beating heart – the locus – from which all things NEBA will come. We owe you a huge debt of gratitude, Cristina. THANK YOU and CONGRATULATIONS!!