Thriving Artist

Website Design and Tech Consulting with Heather Caunt-Nulton

Website Design Portfolio

WordPress

For website clients with a bit of tech savviness and willingness to learn, I highly recommend WordPress for most projects, as it is open-source. This means it as the widest range of available options for plugins and therefore compatability with other systems they may already have in place or want to add in the future. It also means that you have control of all of your website’s functional underpinnings and are free to move it to another server, or make any changes you might require to it, at any time.

Other Platform Options

For extensive, complex ecommerce with fine-grained inventory management, my highest recommendation is to use BigCommerce.

For simple ecommerce with limited control, as well as for anyone who finds learning WordPress intimidating to learn, I recommend SquareSpace.

I have used a variety of other platforms, services, and self-hosted options, and am happy to work with you to find what will work best for your website project.

Testimonials

Past Clients – Impressive, but in the very-distant past:

I have a long history of building and/or editing the websites for any organization that I was an employee of, whenever needed.
As I have worked almost exclusively as aa freelancer and artist for over two decades now, all of these organizations I was employed by have redesigned their websites since I left them. But they make up quite an impressive list, so I will share them here with you, so that you can inquire about what I did for each if you are so inclined:

• Boston University – Applied Linguistics Program
• Boston University – Stone Science Library (aka The Archaeology Library)
• University of Massachusetts at Boston – Applied Linguistics Program
• University of Massachusetts at Boston – Subject Tutoring Program
• GreenCorps

Marketing Strategy Success Receipts:

Though not technically website work, I think it’s fun and worthwhile to note here that my marketing strategy and effectiveness have been deemed so exceptional that India Restaurant has built their entire billboard strategy around showing off the two programs that I originally started for them!

I was able to get a photo of this billboard, featuring their over 6,000 Google Reviews and 4.8 star rating. I encouraged India to claim and focus their efforts on their Google Maps listing back before doing so was standard practice for businesses. I served as their first ever marketing consultant. Nearly twenty years later, thanks to that strong start, with a winning and easily implementable continuing strategy, they are by far the highest rated Indian restaurant in the state.
The other one, not pictured here, features henna body art, which I was the first to suggest offering there twenty years ago.
Henna still sets them apart from their competition so significantyl that they chose to feature that on large billboards.

Let’s see what we can build together!

Whether you’re looking for help building your website, increasing your overall online presence, or are looking for more generalized marketing assistance, please let me know how I can be of assistance using the form below. Every question is important, so the “submit” button at the bottom will only show up once they’ve all been answered.

A Note on Limited Online Presence

This single page portfolio was created specifically at the request of a would-be client at a large organization, who required a more formal portfolio of work that they could share with their board members and other team members.

The website domain, thrivingartist.com, and the Thriving Artist trademark are what is currently associated with this work. Some day, when I retire from doing henna, I will build out a more extensive presence here, where I will not only share my passion for teaching clients to design their own WordPress websites, but will also provide a wide range of other resources to help other creatives thrive in their field of choice.

For now, though, all we have is this single webpage and my LinkedIn.

The story behind Thriving Artist

Heather has been coding webpages since 1995, and attributes much of the success of her henna business to her ability to create and successfully manage websites. She was a member of her high school’s Web Club back when it was rare to have a computer in one’s home, let alone figure out how to connect to the internet (at 14.4k dialup speeds!) and share content there. In that period, she had the best-loved ska-punk website on the ‘net (at least as far as Jeeves and Altavista were concerned). It was a pre-Napster project dedicated to aggregating music uploaded by other users – a Geocities site at /SunsetStrip/. Creating websites has long been just the right combination of problem solving, creative thinking, and design to make her nerdy heart very happy.

She has always been the person tagged in any workplace she has been a part of to manage (and often rebuild) the websites of large organizations. From GreenCorps to various offices at Boston University and UMass Boston, many nonprofit organizations entrusted their web presence to Heather throughout her tenure with them in college and grad school.

The unexpected but now quite long-term success of Henna by Heather, which started as tiny side project in a super-niche market when she was in college, is largely built upon its website and overall internet presence. By being a lifelong student in what she jokingly refers to as “internet domination”, she has been blessed to be able to make a living creating art. Realizing what a blessing this is, she wanted to spread the love, and teach as many of her other fellow artists and small business people how to create their own success in an increasingly digital world.

Heather has helped everyone from her fellow henna artists, to the owner of the world’s first vegan ice cream truck, to hula dancers, reiki practitioners, clothing and coffee shop owners, educators, musicians, and construction industry workers take the future of their business into their own hands by helping them update, create, or radically revamp their web presence.

Helping others build their own success is important for her. Having seen so many of her friends and colleagues at the mercy of their web designers, who would often either disappear or demand tons of cash just to do the simplest and most basic of things, she has been on a personal mission to help people understand their websites enough that they are able to develop and maintain them on their own. By utilizing all the teaching skills she developed in that decade or so when she thought she’d grow up to be an educator, Heather meets clients where they are, builds a solution that will work for them, and teaches them how to utilize it to its full potential.

All this said, Heather’s practice of doing this has always been an ad-hoc thing, done on-demand as needed for whatever situation might arise among her circle of friends, artist colleagues, fellow local small business people, etc. But, with recent developments having shown she is quite capable of taking on larger projects (more about that later), she is thinking she would like to do this on a more regular basis, and for a broader client base.

Writing out this little history of how it all came about and what it is she really does for people is the first step towards making that happen.

Watch this space. A more involved story may just develop here.
Most notably, there will be screenshots of client work, as well as narratives of what was done and why, as this is the kind of thing that she has learned people who do not just trust her implicitly would like to see.

ThrivingArtist.com and Thriving Artist ™ are a project of Heather Caunt-Nulton, the artist behind HennaByHeather.com.