The Ol' Dot Com

Yesterday I gave my website a major, much-needed overhaul. (That until yesterday my bio said I live in Santa Rosa tells you everything you need to know about how much attention I've been paying to it.) It's always a struggle deciding how "professional"-looking to make my public persona.
Because really. I'm not "professional." I'm strange and whimsical and inappropriate. So do I have my website portray me as this person I'm not because it looks better to prospective clients, and then they meet me and find out what I'm really like? Or do I let them know up front: "This is me! This is the personality you'll be dealing with if you decide to work with me!"?
So I err on the side of the latter method. I guess if I were a doctor or lawyer or otherwise "serious" person it be a better idea to present a more "professional" (whatever the hell that means anyway) appearance. But I'm not in a serious field, I'm in the art field where they kind of want you to be strange and whimsical and inappropriate. And it doesn't do me any good to try to be someone I'm not, since I also have the misfortune of being a very unintentionally obvious kind of person and people tend to see through me in about three seconds.
And anyway, every middle school guidance counselor and after school special tells you to "just be yourself." And it's taken a long time for me to figure out how to do that, so now that I have I may as well stick with it for a while. (Incidentally, I think the "Just Be Yourself" mantra is the most useless, bullshit, potentially detrimental piece of advice you could foist onto a kid, but I don't have time to get into that right now so I'll save it for a future post.)
It's also hard deciding what pieces to put up for display. I took all the fairies down because I'm planning on doing something else with them (possibly giving them their own page), and I'd rather have them copyrighted first (as soon as I figure out how... there's a lot of things they don't teach you in art school, like intellectual property and your legal rights and responsibilities). It's a hard call because I feel like they're the best representation of my work, but I'd rather be safe than sorry and if I risk any of my work getting ripped off, I'd rather it be anything else but them.
And my work... while I'm doing it, and posting it on the internet for friends and family, it's all well and peachy. But as soon as I post up as though someone might want to buy it, suddenly I start thinking, "GOD NOTHING I DO IS GOOD ENOUGH WHY DID I THINK ANYONE WOULD BE INTERESTED IN THIS CRAP THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE BETTER THAN ME GAAAHHHHHH!" Does this ever happen to anyone else? How do you cope?
Anyway, I didn't mean for this entry to be all introspective and vulnerable. Really all I wanted to say was that I updated my website. So - I updated my website! Go check it out!