We are pleased to announce the launch of pet-art.org.uk, the online showcase for Northampton animal portrait artist, Colin Ashby.

Colin is a portrait artist based in Northampton, in the Midlands, where he has been building up an impressive portfolio of pet art, wildlife scenery and people portraits.

In recent years, the main bulk of our website development has been with the CMS Drupal. However, for this project we returned to an old favourite: Wordpress. Our primary reason was not the superior blogging capabilities of Wordpress, though Colin is apparently planning to journal on the site, as a way to record the creation of his current animal portraits. Neither is it the simple ease with which Wordpress allows you to create new pages and page hierarchies, which Colin isusing to display tips and tutorials on how to begin pet art and wildlife painting.

The truth is, we used Wordpress because this was initially supposed to be a small job! However, we were so impressed with Colin Ashby's art-work - and he had so many good ideas - that the site just kept growing and developing. Yet, Wordpress was able to cope with whatever we threw at it!

As well as developing sites with Wordpress, when we've required a CMS for smaller, simpler sites, we've enjoyed using e107 and Website Baker. We've even been known to dabble in Mambo and Joomla. However, as Colin's site has shown, if you're not building with Drupal (for whatever reason) there's no really no reason not to use Wordpress.

Finally, I've got to say that I just love the image below (and on the home page), which shows a genuine shot of the moment someone received Colin's painting of her horse as a surprise gift:

Check out the site for an example of our work, as well as some remarkable animal art: www.pet-art.org.uk.

And, of course, if you're looking to hire a portrait artist, or want to see some pet art in Northampton, you could do a lot worse that visiting Colin Ashby!