Dan Louth: Sharing your kids’ art the simple way

Menlo Park native Dan Louth’s two children love to draw, producing a household bursting with art. But there wasn’t a way to catalog the artworks or easily size them for posters.

Drawing on his background as a software engineer, Dan came up with a solution – he built a website called ShareMyKidsArt. “It started out just for our family’s personal use,” he said, “but when other parents heard about it, they wanted to use it, too, so I made it a public site.”

Using ShareMyKidsArt, parents can create galleries, cataloging art in a variety of ways that fits each families needs, be it a month’s creations or by subject matter or medium. “It’s free to use,” says Dan. “There’s a store if people want to order products like custom calendars, cards and mugs.”

Dan’s trying to get the word out about the site’s existence to schools and organizations like camps. He’s also working on getting the bugs out. “This is the first website I’ve built, so I’m really, really interested in getting feedback,” he says. “The best email I get is from people who say ‘what about this or what about that.’ There’s still a good bit of fine tuning to do. Only by people using the site will we figure out how to make it better.”

Footnote: Dan grew up in Sharon Heights and now lives in west Menlo. He’s a hometown fan: “I love Menlo Park. I thought about moving away when I was young. But where was I going to go that was better?”