With the launch of the new web page today, I thought it would be fun to see how far we’ve come (and all the names we’ve come through!) along the way.
I started my online costuming business before I began teaching in earnest. Here was the first web page I ever designed:
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Not long after I began selling videos by Gypsy Caravan, I asked Paulette on the phone one day if she would mentor me to be a teacher. She accepted me as her first teacher trainee outside her studio, and this web page was the result:
Not long after was my first student troupe, Shaia Tribe, for whom I made their own web page. I asked a local dancer-artist to draw the logo you see at the center:
Around this time I developed the site at tribalbellydance.org. It never grew as I planned, but I still hold onto to hope that one day it will meet its potential.
My pro troupe developed and grew, through Raqs al-Hamra, our earliest incarnation, to eventually inFusion Tribal. Sadly, the old websites for Raqs al-Hamra were not well preserved on the Wayback Machine, but I have some screen-caps from some of the old inFusion Tribal websites (some from when they were in development).
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My business names have gone through an evolution as well. When I closed my costuming business, I needed a name for my work primarily as a dance teacher. Mandala Tribal was born:
When my pro troupe disbanded, I felt the need for a change and briefly started the new adventure as Double Take Bellydance.
But it quickly felt like I had made the wrong choice, and I gravitated toward a name I had long been in love with but resisted using to avoid potential confusion with another dance group which shared one of the key words. (I needn’t have been concerned, they changed their name not long after for their own reasons, anyway!) Which brings us to the site that was what you saw here until yesterday!
What a fun walk down memory lane this was! And man, I found websites I created for other clients along the way, designs I made but never used, community websites I have developed (the old seattletribal.com and in recent years, nwbellydance.com), and so many other web sites along the way. What a wild ride!
I guess the moral of the story (does there have to be a moral? Nah, but humor me.) is that we artists are in a constant state of change. These websites represent just a small piece of the much deeper and wider evolution of my dance, design, art, and business. For those who have been along for any of this crazy road I have been walking since the last millennium (!!), Thank You for your encouragement, support, and friendship.
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