Let the music play!

Times have been pretty busy here at Asni: Multimedia - not just with web design work, but various other projects. I have been working on some illustrations, designing next year's calendars to sell in my online shop, planning my trip to Europe in June, and harvesting large quantities of apples and walnuts from my garden.

In amongst all that, I do occasional still find time to do some work on my own website. The main task at the moment is to bring the old part of my website, which was originally intended to promote my work as a musician, up to scratch. Quite the undertaking, for this part of the website has been growing like a fungus for the past eight or nine years. Weeding is as much part of the job of running a website, as it is in the garden!

The obvious thing to do for a site which is intended to promote a musician, is to put on some music clips. I used to have audio files for download on the site, but these days this seems like a very clumsy and old fashioned way of doing things. So this past month, I've been busy developing my very own flash music player, which enables me to offer music streaming, for instant listening gratification. No more twiddling your fingers until that download finishes!

So far, I have completed the page with music samples from my most recent CD, "Travels in Middle-earth", which you can listen to here. - the other CDs will follow suit eventually.

Please note that this is an application which I have developed from scratch, and if you have ever programmed a computer, you will know that things never quite work the way they were intended, for everyone, in every browser and operating system, instantaneously and without protracted testing. I have already spent a month fixing up things in response to feedback from various people for whom it was not quite working as intended - as far as I am aware, it should be perfectly operational now, but if you do experience a problem, PLEASE LET ME KNOW ABOUT IT. It always surprises me how many people assume that they're probably just to stupid to operate a computer, when something does not work, instead of yelling at the web designer to fix things. We do need to be yelled at. It's the only way we can spot if something doesn't work.

Moreover, I have also just signed a digital distribution contract for this album with CDBaby.com - so if you like what you hear, you can download a couple of tracks, or indeed the whole album, for a moderate amount of money, here. I promise to report on how this goes for me, sometime in a future blog post!

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: http://webdesign.asni.net :: http://www.asni.net

To Facebook, or not to Facebook ...

... Actually, that is not really the question. Whatever else one may think of it, Facebook is, hands down, one of the most efficient online tools for people who run small businesses or work as independent professionals. Its ability to to automatically find and suggest contacts on the basis of shared friends, shared interests, or a shared work history, is incredibly useful especially for those who are operating in a niche market, or a particular local environment.

There are two different types of profiles one can set up on Facebook. The personal profile is intended for private, personal interactions. Access to it is restricted to those people who are on your "friend" list. Users can send friend requests to another user, and these need to be individually, and mutually approved. As per Facebook rules, personal profiles are required to be registered under your real name - though this is a rule that gets bent quite a bit. I admit that I myself have registered two profiles, one under my real name, which I have set to private, and strictly limited to people I actually know in real life, or from other online forums. My other profile is registered under my stage name, and this has turned out really useful for making contact lots and lots of other harpists. My sheet music sales have gone up noticeably since I started posting on Facebook!

Ideally, this second Facebook profile should have been a "page" - but I admit that when I first joined Facebook, it took me a little while to get my head around how to best set it up, and by that time my second profile had already accumulated a sizable friend list! I do have a page as well, but have found that people are more likely to send me friend requests to my personal profile. Perhaps it feels less one sided? Or perhaps it is simply a snowball effect. There are several other musicians on that friends list who also use their stage name on their profile, so I don't feel too bad about it. Personally I think it should be a person's choice if they want to share their real name on the internet, particularly given the recurring issues about Facebook privacy policies.

The other option is to set up a Facebook "page". These are specifically intended for promoting your business or service, art, music, or personal or public interest. There are "Community pages", which can be created by anyone, and "Official pages", which may only be created by an official representative of the business, organization or person in question. Official pages come in three different flavours: "local business", "brand, product or organization", and "artist, band or public figure". It is necessary to register a personal profile first, which is used to administer the page.

Unlike personal profiles, pages can usually be seen by anyone browsing the internet - you need not be logged in to Facebook to access it (though this depends on the privacy settings you choose). They are also more one-sided than profiles: people can decide to "like" a page, which means that anything posted on the page will appear in their news stream. This does not require approval from the owner of the page. Also, unlike becoming "friends" with someone, the things that the users who have subscribed to your page post on their profiles, will not appear in your news stream! If you have ever managed a profile with more than a couple of hundred users - each of whom may be promoting their own pet cause or interest - you will instantly grasp the advantage of this. ;)

Two other useful features on Facebook deserve at least a short mention: "Events" can be created either on your official page or your personal profile. Creating an event allows you to send invitations to the people on your friends list, and to update them with posts on the events page. People can also respond to say they are attending, or not attending. A very economical way to inform and update your core audience about anything from opening and launches, to special offers or new websites.

"Groups" are in some ways similar to community pages, and can be used to interact with other people who share a common hobby or interest. If your business operates in a niche market, this may be a good way to get the attention of people who may be interested in your service or product! However, bear in mind that groups are not primarily intended for self promotion - it really is all about the interaction, on Facebook.

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: http://webdesign.asni.net :: http://www.asni.net

Fantastic Journeys

These last eight weeks I have been taking a bit of a break, and exchanged my funky web designer's hat for a more exuberant artist's head gear. "Fantastic Journeys - Paintings and Music inspired by Ursula Le Guin" at Thistle Hall in Wellington was my first solo exhibition, and an opportunity to dig out the old harp and showcase my musical talents as well. The good news that the space at Thistle Hall was available came at very short notice, leaving me all of seven weeks to put together the show, do all the publicity and advertising, as well as finish a few more paintings! Which explains the recent gap in my blogging.

Being an online promotion expert comes in handy when planning such a show on a shoestring budget. One of the first and most obvious things to do was to set up a dedicated page with information about the show, and downloadable press material, on my website - I even created an appropriate CSS layout for the purpose!

Once I have had time to catch a breath, I will expand this page into a little self contained section of the site, with photos and feedback, and perhaps even a bit of video. That way all my overseas friends who have posted on my Facebook event page that they would love to come, if only they could get the teleporter to work, can at least share some of the experience!

I have also made good use of my monthly newsletter, and dedicated the last two issues mainly to the show.

New Zealand in general, and Wellington in particular, are quite well endowed with sites which provide free events listings, and I have availed myself of that that opportunity very systematically. The Eventfinder website is a relatively new site which offers the great advantage that a whole host of other sites pull their content from there - so with one listing, one can get a plethora of adverts all over the net.

The Big Idea is considerably less streamlined - I had to upload my information in three different places and fill in a lengthy upload form each time to do it - but offers the advantage of a large and dedicated readership of people involved in, or interested in the arts sector in New Zealand. I also managed to find a couple of wonderful volunteers to help me with the preparations for the show, and with making things go smoothly at the opening!

Wotzon, Feeling Great and WellingtonNZ.com are sites which are dedicated to events in and around Wellington - I found the last site to be particularly well presented, and they even showcased my show, which was very kind of them!

Apparently my media release did the trick this time - apart from scoring two radio interviews, on RadioActive and VBC (both also streamed on the net), and having one of my images printed with the events listiing in the Dominion Post's Thursday Arts Supplement, I was particularly pleased that the staff at Wellington City Library took the opportunity to write a blog post recommending Ursula Le Guin's books, with a mention of my show and a big picture of the bright yellow dragon which also graced my posters and flyers for the show.

Last but not least, the show offered an opportunity and and excuse to send out nicely designed html email invitations featuring some of my work, to all the publishers and gallery owners in Wellington, along with a great bunch of friends, business contacts and fellow artists. Over the six days, I had a total of 246 visitors come through my show, which, for a little self promoted first show at Thistle Hall, strikes me as a fairly solid number. :)

Fun was had, and valuable lessons learned. But now, back to web design!

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: http://webdesign.asni.net :: http://www.asni.net

Devious fun with online promotion :: part 1

Those who know me well will know that I am a *little* bit obsessed with web statistics. And that's not meaning just my Google or Alexa stats or my page hits and visitor count - ranking systems of all sorts of shapes hold a weird fascination for me. I want to understand them. And yes, occasionally I would quite like to be able to trick them, mostly when I see what kind of dross sometimes washes up to the top of the rankings, evidently just because someone is doing a particularly good job at promoting their stuff.

Tricking, let me say it, does not work, in the long run. But there are few things that do work if paid proper attention to, and these tend to be the same, regardless if it's a major search engine you are dealing with, or if you just want to have your holiday photos on some social networking site seen by more people.

This past year, I have been quite active on Deviantart.com, where I've had my own online gallery for the past five years. As I got more involved with the wider community there, it occurred to me that in a lot of ways, Deviantart mirrors the workings of the whole of the internet, on a more contained scale.

The site gives everyone the opportunity to post their artwork, photos, designs, craft objects, or literary works online in their own customizable online gallery. With every gallery also comes a blog or "journal", and a message centre for communicating with other Deviants. Basic service is free, more features can be accessed by paying a moderate annual fee. There is no selection process as to who can open a gallery - but there is what I would like to call a democratic selection process in how much attention your gallery attracts.

"Attention", in DeviantArt terms, can be of several kinds: Gallery views, "Deviation" views, gallery "Watches", Comments and "Favourites" are the main flavours, and as a paid subscriber, I have access to a set of fairly detailed statistics regarding how well my own "Deviations" are doing. (I do, btw, love the choice of word. A "Deviation is any submission to a DeviantArt gallery -- and those of us who practise art in any form know all too well how the rest of the race regards these activities - unless we manage to attain "genius" status, but that is usually only obtainable by dying. But I digress. --)

Like any good Web 2.0 site, DeviantArt is not just about putting your work out there and getting it seen, it is very much also about interacting with other fellow artists. When I joined DeviantArt I was fortunate to have a head start because I already knew a small group of fellow illustrators from another online community, so I started out with a few people watching my gallery.

For the first few years, I mostly limited myself to uploading artwork, and posting the occasional journal entry. Every work submitted floats up in a "channel" of most recent works, which can be drilled down by medium and genre (e.g. "Traditional Art" - "Painting" - "Fantasy"), or limited by topic through a search function (e.g. "dragon", or "eiffel tower"). People do browse those channels, and work that stands out will thus immediately attract more views than work which is a bit humdrum.

Each new Deviation is also posted to your Watcher's message centre, where they can decide to view it or not.

At this leisurely pace, my gallery was slow to gain momentum, and there was a very clear relation between the frequency of posting new work, and the number of pageviews I achieved. A couple of years ago I decided to upgrade to a paid subscription, and one of the tendencies that became immediately evident was that certain images - not, in my own opinion, necessarily my best or most interesting, or even most recent ones - were attracting a disproportionate amount of views.

This, I deduced, must have to do with the option to search images by topic - my single most viewed Deviation, to date, is an illustration for Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", which, appart from being compulsory school reading, also seems to enjoy undiminished popularity among teenagers in English speaking countries. Another popular image was a decidedly shoddy early attempt at Photomanipulation, depicting a scene from the Narnia books.

At the end of last year, my gallery was sitting at about 5700 gallery views (counted over the whole of its four year existence) - with a noticeable increase in views over the second half of 2008, which I attributed to a combination of posting more and better works, more regular journal entries, and a natural gathering of momentum as my gallery acquired more "Watchers".

At the beginning of this year, I set myself a deliberate goal of bringing my gallery up to 10 000 views. At the time, I thought that would be a tough goal to reach. I achieved that goal by mid October, and at the end of the year, I was just short of 12 000 pageviews - which means I have more than doubled my page view count this year.

How did I achieve this? I'll tell you about that in my next blog! :)

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: webdesign.asni.net :: www.asni.net

The Big Secret of Online Success

Upcoming Events: "Harnessing the power of the internet - online promotion for Artists" :: Public talk, Tuesday 20 October 2009, 11 am - 1 pm. Venue: Public Library, Petone. More information: Hutt Valley Community Arts website or email.

A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to attend a seminar on the topic of web promotion and “web persuasion”, which was provided by one of the bigger and better web design companies here in New Zealand (we call this “spying on the competition” – though, to be sure, those people aim at a far more corporate market than my small artsy home studio).

What have I learned on the occasion? Well, first of all, that these guys don’t know anything earthshaking that I haven’t figured out for myself by now - or if they do, that’s not the sort of info they divulge in a public seminar!

Secondly, they seem to have spotted the same issue that is my motivation for writing this blog: The need to educate people more about the whole area of web (as opposed to print) communication, and how to effectively transmit your message through your website and other online tools. The need to have a strategy, before you even begin the first site draft.

Owning and running a website is 100% a dynamic process. A site is a living document that should reflect your business or your artistic or professional activities at every stage – not something you can hand over to your web designer and then expect to never be bothered with any more.

“But how do I do this if I don’t know how to build websites?” you may well ask. Actually, these days, changing the content of your own website has become ridiculously easy. There are numerous editing tools out there – some of them freeware – which allow you to change text, links and even images like you would in a text document. When you get a website, make sure your web designer sets you up with one of those – and instructs you in how to use these tools!

Then of course there is also a massive, and steadily growing plethora of online tools that don’t even require that much effort and computer knowledge. Social and professional networking sites, blogs, image, music and video sharing sites, online forums on every topic in the world, auction sites and shop fronts - you name it.

Keeping up with all that sometimes seems like an overwhelming task that could easily suck the 24 hours out of your day! But, as the good folks at the web seminar pointed out – it is very hard to achieve a 100% change all at once, but it is quite easy to achieve a 1% change a hundred times. All it takes is a little discipline, and quite a lot of patience.

Patience and discipline – there’s one of the Big Secrets of being successful on the web! And one which the Snake Oil Merchants probably won’t tell you. ☺