Samples of my website work for hire

Not long after moving to Aberdeen, I did a blogspot website for the first annual Art Drives Studio Tour. They replaced me the next year and moved to a .org site, artdrives.org which seems to be defunct.

I know they did at least two annual Art Drives Studio Tours. I don't know if they did more. 

According to opengovwa.com the Art Drives organization dissolved in 2020 yet is Active:
The entity was incorporated on December 24, 2018 in Washington, expiring on December 31, 2023, disolved on May 3, 2020. The current entity status is Active. 
That's weirdly conflicting and I don't know what that means.

My blogspot version of the first site remains live because blogspot has no ongoing carrying costs. I also have experience with WordPress sites and hand coding in HTML and CSS. I chose blogspot for a long list of reasons, including the fact that it's free so people doing one-person shops as artists don't need to fret about such things and can get back to developing it in a year or five. Whatever.

I also did two websites for local artists:
My competition was a local guy charging like a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars for a site with carrying costs. I was charging more like $150 for a two page starter site and no ongoing costs if you didn't add a custom URL.

I imagined local artists living in the cheap seats would be thrilled and happy to promote me and encourage everyone to get a low cost site to get officially online for next to nothing. No, that's not how that went.

Art Drives was briefly its own organization but when I did the website, it was just getting started and was under the umbrella of a local nonprofit called Our Aberdeen.

According to opengovwa.com, the nonprofit Our Aberdeen:
The entity was incorporated on August 4, 2010 in Washington, expiring on August 31, 2022. The current entity status is Delinquent. 
Their website ouraberdeen.com remains live but my recollection is that the Dickersons -- the elderly couple running it as their hobby -- paid for those domain names on a personal credit card for multiple years in advance. So that's not necessarily evidence the organization is still live in any meaningful way.

After I got fed up with abusive treatment and quit, they repointed the domain Aberdeenartandmusic.com which made the blogspot site I had created invisible.

The domain name aberdeenartandmusic.com was purchased as the official domain name for the city certified local creative district which never became state certified. I was tasked with doing the writing for the application and Wil Russoul -- the individual hired as the Executive Director for the local
Main Street program where I had applied for the same position -- was sabotaging my efforts to further the application and I decided I wasn't going to play this game and quit everything.

The Dickersons purchased that .com name and asked me to position it as the official website for the creative district and they were the ones that pushed through the city certification, a necessary step towards state certification which still has not happened in spite of Aberdeen being one of the FIRST interested parties visited by an arts.wa representative etc. in early 2018, a time when there wasn't a single state certified creative district and now there seem to be about twenty.

About three months after he started the job, Wil Russoul told me once in exasperation "If I QUIT, I'll recommend you as my replacement. You could totally do the job." That was like May of 2018 and in June I sent the board an updated resume and let them know I would be interested in any position, part-time or full-time, with the organization and could start anytime because I was a freelancer, thus had no need to give two weeks notice to an employer before starting a new position.

I figured if he did quit or if they fired him -- because I also began being told by Sylvia Dickerson and at least one other person that I might have another shot at the job -- then they could promptly fill the position if they so desired. Or maybe he would be successful and need a part-time assistant.

The Dickersons never felt he was qualified and were trying to convince people in town to replace him with me and I was getting caught in the crossfire because -- from what I gather -- after everyone who was anyone in town concluded he wasn't really qualified -- him included -- instead of firing him and hiring someone else, they told him something like "Keep her seat warm until she's over this little bout of incurable deadly genetic disorder."

So I believe he was telling people my criticisms of his work were not trustworthy because I was gunning for his job. Shortly after I got fed up with the whole thing and emailed them to officially retract my statement of interest, I was told I was going to be evicted and thrown out into the street with no real notice during a global pandemic.

I looked up the laws and let the manager know this was illegal and ultimately they moved me to a different unit to do the repairs they claimed were the reason I was being evicted. Ultimately they did illegally evict me in 2024 and I simply left town.

I believe that most likely, Wil Russoul made a phone call and ASKED my landlord to illegally evict me during a global pandemic as attempted murder with plausible deniability because I had retracted my statement of interest and continued blogging about local development issues, so he could no longer handwave off my critique as me trash talking him with a goal of taking his job.

I have removed the coding that made aberdeenartandmusic.com the custom domain name for the blogspot version of the site. This had a side effect of making the site visible online again and I have removed some of the parts of the site claiming it belonged to Our Aberdeen and was the official website for the local creative district so I can use it solely as a sample of my work.

IF both Sylvia Dickerson and Michael Dickerson are deceased and Our Aberdeen is defunct, I believe the local creative district likely reasonably has a legal interest in the domain aberdeenartandmusic.com for which the Dickersons paid money. I believe the district has no reasonable legal interest in the blogspot site which was abandoned in 2020 and was invisible for five years until a few hours ago.

A search for Michael Dickerson Aberdeen Washington obituary turns up the following for the local paper:
Death Notice - The Daily World
Arrangements are by Harrison Family Mortuary. Michael Dickerson. Michael E. Dickerson of Aberdeen died Friday, Nov. 22, 2024, at Harbor Regional Health Community …

I have been unable to find an obituary for his wife, Sylvia Dickerson. That's the best I can do for due diligence given the extremely acrimonious history I have with the Dickersons and others in town pertinent to these issues.

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