News from Henge Hill

The blog of Steven Thomas Bunn, Windsor Chairmaker

            Welcome to my new and updated blog. Visitors to my website, www.stevenbunn.com, this past summer found my site filled with pop up confetti and other garbage. The site quickly fell in ranking from its former position in a Google search. The local website developers who had made upgrades to the site, were unable or unwilling to address the problem and refused to return my calls or answer my emails. Luckily, my older son Andrew, a software developer decided to move back to Maine this summer and offered to help me get the site fixed and back on line.It is hard for me to be lieve that the infection was malicious, given that my site existed online for over twenty years with no problems. Andrew is of the opinion that the site was written in an earlier version of Drupal that was no longer being supported and thus more open to infection. Andrew put the infected site through what I can only describe as a heavy-duty wash and dry cycle that produced a clean copy of the original site, which was then moved to a secure web host. Moving the website to a new host broke some links with the programming in which the original blog was written and it made sense to create a new blog. I will re-post many of the more interesting posts from the past on this new blog as time goes on.

            Rebuilding the website allows me to address several issues with the site. One of these is identity. In an ideal world my site should also say and Windsor Chair-maker. I have called myself a furniture-maker for the past forty years. When I left Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers twenty-eight years ago, finished building my present shop, and opened for business, the internet was in its infancy. Bowdoinham, the village I live in, has always had a large number of skilled woodworkers, and I needed a product that separated me from my competition, many of whom I shared breakfast or lunch with at the local diner. I chose to concentrate on crafting Windsor chairs, and over time acquired a reputation for building high quality traditional Windsor chairs. I never took into consideration that a Google search for “Windsor chairmaker” would rank me lower than my peers given the obvious content of my website.  It’s time to face the music and stand up and say: “My name is Steven Bunn and I am a Windsor Chairmaker,” (with apologies to AA).

            My hope is that you will find my site and blog interesting and entertaining and will return occasionally to see what is going on in the shop. Thanks for dropping by—STB