Introducing: www.margarethiley.com

This month has been mostly busy with proper paid web design work, which is just how it should be. I've already introduced the Wellington Yoga Centre website in my latest - it is now properly online and live, and can be admired here: www.wellingtonyogacentre.co.nz

Next up was a business website for a client in the UK, Margaret Hiley. She is the sister of a fellow budding illustrator friend I met online, and a specialist on Tolkien and music! A little while ago she asked me if she might cite from my Travels in Middle-earth CD booklet for a review she was writing, and things sort of developed from there. Incidentally, her father is a professor of Musicology, and the author of a big fat scholarly study and reference on Medieval Plainchant, which has been gracing my bookshelf long before I ever met either of his daughters. Such is the smallness of the planet.

Margaret is a professional academic and keen folk musician, and - having grown up bilingual - has recently set up a business offering English/German translation, editing and proofreading services for academics, writers, and the cultural and creative industries. Her areas of specialist expertise include fantasy and science fiction literature, music and musicology, myth and mythology, media studies, and breweries … so we do have quite a few interests in common!

This site has been a real pleasure to work on - not least because I could play with the beautiful cartoons created by Margaret's sister Catherine, an illustrator and print maker currently residing in Edinburgh.

I am really pleased with the look of this site, and even more pleased with some of the behind-the-scenes functionality, which is based on some smart and economical application of PHP scripts: for instance the "testimonials" page, where new referrals can easily be added by uploading a text file to the appropriate folder on the web server. This task is easy to do even for the not so computer initiated, and it is a much more simple and streamlined solution than setting up a complex content management system requiring a database.

Have a look at my latest brand spanking new website! Proudly introducing: www.margarethiley.com

Some feedback from the client: "Well, what can I say - I love it!!! Very clever what you have done with the watercolour image - thanks!" :: "I can't wait till the site is up and everyone can see how great it looks!"

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

Planning your Site: The How

In my last blog, I talked about two of the most important questions you ought to ask yourself when planning your website: "Who will this site be for?" and "What do I want them to do?"

In this blog, I will look at some of the most obvious tasks a website can perform for you, and the technologies that are needed to make those tasks possible.

Most professional or business websites fulfill one or more of the following functions:

• present information about your work or your products in an easily accessible manner that can conveniently be kept up to date - the "brochure" website
• sell things, either directly through a shopping cart system, or by enabling people to place orders from a product catalogue - the "online shop" website
• offer user interaction: guest books or message boards to leave feedback, search functions to find targeted information, forms to request quotes, online booking systems, online help desks - the "interactive" website
• inform and entertain: blogs about topics relevant to your industry, collections of helpful or fun links, image galleries, online video or flash presentations, interactive games - the "brand building" website

Different technologies are needed to fulfill these different functions: a brochure type site may only require straightforward html/css - though it may be advisable to include features like a search function, login system, or catalogue type features, which would require Php/MySql, or another programming language that works with a database. And unless you are comfortable to update your own html, by using an html editor or even writing your own code, you may wish to have a content management system included, which also requires some programming.

Shopping carts can be installed either as ready made packages - Zendcart or Cubecart are popular systems, though it requires some programming expertise to set them up - or they can be custom programmed. Security is an important issue when it comes to e-commerce applications: you would want to make sure that your client's credit card information will be well protected! The simplest (and free) solution is using the Paypal system. This is only really advisable for shops with relatively few products, but it is a feasible solution if for one reason or another, you cannot run Php/MySql on your web server.

If you would like to interact with your clients via message boards, have "members only" features on your site, enable visitors to do site searches, or even upload content themselves, you will not get around using Php/MySql or one of the other web programming languages, such as ASP. All these features work with an online database, where information can by uploaded, by yourself or even by visitor to the site, depending on how it is set up. The Php scripts then pull this information from the database and automatically write the html code that is at the base of what your site visitors see. Not only does this make site maintenance and updates much faster and more painless, it also allows for all sorts of customizations - to the point where no two people will see exactly the same content when they visit your site! It does require a bit of setting up and programming, and the price tag for an interactive site is therefore quite a bit higher than that for a simple brochure type site or even an online shopping cart.

Flash is another technology which is very prominent on the web. Flash has got a bit of a bad name in some web design circles: not just because of the infamous (and once so popular) "Flash intro" that takes fifteen minutes to load and is a surefire way to make most prospective visitors click on to the next site - but mainly because sites which are built entirely in Flash, cannot be indexed by search engines. Obviously, this is not good for your search engine ranking! A Flash site essentially is a self contained file that is embedded in an html page. Search engines only read html, they do not read Flash - so any keywords you display within your Flash site will be invisible from the search engine's point of view.

The beauty of Flash, however, lies in using Flash components within an html context. Flash also comes with its own very powerful programming language, Actionscript 3.0. It is an essential technology if you wish to include rich multimedia content in your site: music clips, video, slide shows, animations, little interactive games or even just a few cool buttons that do interesting things.

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

Planning your Site: The Who's and What's

The two questions you ought to ask yourself when you are planning to set up a new website, are: "Who will this site be for?" and "What do I want them to do?"

Determining your audience really needs to be the first step in any web design or online promotion project. If you are planning a business site, you will probably have some sort of a business plan, even it it is just in your head (though writing it down really *is* a good idea, I can tell you from experience!). Who do you want to sell your products and services to? Who is likely to buy them? What, in other words, is your target market? Those are the people you want to design your website for.

Are they older people or younger people? Educated? Professionals? Employees? Business owners? Stay at home moms and dads? Kids? Elderly? LIberal or conservative? Rich or poor? Idealistic or cynical? Are they likely to have visual impairments or disabilities? Is English their main language? Will they be able to deal with long chunks of text, or might it be better to rely more heavily on graphics or video? A lot of younger people are accustomed to take in information by audiovisual media - video tutorials, slide shows, comic style storyboards - rather than read through long reams of text. If you are targeting a younger audience, you might want to think about integrating video, audio, or perhaps even an interactive game into your site.

What is the visual style that would appeal to the people you are trying to get interested in your site? Colourful and playful, artsy and sophisticated, or down to earth and businesslike? More importantly, what are the keywords they might be looking for, and what is the information or functionality they might expect to find on your site? How computer literate are they likely to be? Will they be comfortable doing transactions purely online, or would it be best to leave a phone number so they can call you and chat you up? Or if you are targeting an overseas market, why not get your pages translated into their language? This is bound to immediately get you better search results, seeing that the vast majority of content on the web is in English - so any content in any other language will have much less competition.

Location is also important for your choice of a web hosting service. Search engines rank sites according to geographic preferences - if you are entering a search term in New Zealand, the search engine will assume that pages from New Zealand are more relevant than pages from overseas. It is the physical location of your web server that determines this: if you are targeting a local or national market, you should definitely choose a web host located in New Zealand. If you are targeting your products or services overseas, it is often a better idea to get off shore web hosting - if you are targeting a particular country, choose a host in that country, or if you're going for world wide coverage, you might be best advised to pick a host located in the US. Hosting is usually cheaper there, or at least, you tend to get more bang for your buck.

After you have figured out who the people are who will come to your website - a good exercise is to actually draw up a few "typical" personality profiles and even give them names - then you need to think about what it is you want them to *do*, once they have found your site.

If your site is an online shop, the obvious answer would be "I want them to buy something". But there are many other ways you can sell things over the net, other than getting people to click ye olde Paypal button. You could offer them a quote calculator, or ask them to fill in a form so you can get back to them with a quote. You can ask them to email you, or give you a phone call, or visit your store. You can advertise events and special promotions. You can use the site for your market research and introduce quizzes or polls to get customer information. You can get people to sign up for a newsletter and leave you their email address. You can ask people to tell others about your site - perhaps via Facebook, or Twitter, or Digg, or any other of those new fangled social media. Or you can even just use your site as a portfolio to refer people to for samples of your work, your cv and recommendations. You could also use your site to be blatantly political and get that opinion out there that none of the newspapers wants to print - though this option would be mostly interesting for non-profit organizations.

The point is, you have to ASK people to do whatever it is you want them to do - don't rely on them figuring out for themselves.

If you want to sell an item, put a Paypal button where people can see and click it, ideally right on your home page. If you would like for people to give you a call, put your phone number in bold on your front page. If you want to get emailed, put an email link. If you want people to sign up for something, set up a login system so people can't access all of the content of your page unless they sign up. If you want people to tell others, ask them to, and make it easy for them - Facebook, Twitter etc have applications that allow people to post links to their profiles at the click of a mouse.

Sometimes it is better to not be too much "in people's faces". If you have a new and innovative product or service, it might be best to get people to read up your information and recommendations first, before you try to get them to click that "Buy now" button. In those cases, think carefully about the click flow - the sequence of pages - that you want people to follow, and make it easy for them to follow that flow. A good web designer will be able to assist you with this. That is, in fact, what good design really is all about!

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

Devious Fun with Online Promotion :: part 2

In my last blog, I wrote about my DeviantArt account and how I have been promoting my illustration work there. DeviantArt works, in a lot of ways, like a mirror image of the internet as a whole, on a more contained scale. Incidentally, one of the consequences of this is that it can serve as an excellent learning and testing ground for your online promotion strategies - what works, and what does not work.

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?

These are the things that I found have been consistently driving traffic to my page:

1. Submitting works of better quality. When all is said and done, this is the single most important factor in making your DeviantArt gallery a success. The people who post there are all artists, and they won't be fooled by work of dubitable quality, no matter how cleverly it is promoted. But conversely, a lot of very fine work is sitting in the corners getting hardly any notice, just because the artist is to shy or does not know how to put her or his work out there.

At the beginning of last year, I posted an illustration for Ursula Le Guin's "Earthsea" series. Up to then, I would have described my skill level as "competent amateur". This was the first time that I felt I would be completely confident to submit this image in a professional context. It was also the first time I realized the difference between posting an image that a few people like enough to comment on or award a "favourite", and an image that truly resonates with people. The image picked up views and favourites at a rate that was completely out of proportion with any of the other works I had submitted up to then. And it quite quickly floated up to the first page in searches for "Earthsea" or "Le Guin". In fact, for a while it even made the first page in Google, for the search term "Earthsea illustration"! Of course, this would also have contributed to driving traffic to my DeviantArt page. After all, the gallery is not only visible to fellow Deviants.

2. Submitting work frequently and regularly, while at the same time avoiding to flood your watcher's message centres. This can be a tricky balance to find. Most people will come to your gallery repeatedly - especially once you have built up a following of "Watchers" and friends in the DeviantArt community - and they will watch out for your new work - so supplying them on a fairly regular basis is important, otherwise they will lose interest. But viewing Deviations does take time, so submitting works too often, or too many images at the same time, is also counterproductive. Don't we all know that if we get bombarded with too much stuff, we'll eventually just switch off.

There's no recipe for finding the right balance, really - it's all a matter of experience, and perhaps a bit of gut feeling. One of those things one can only learn by doing it.

3. Tagging your images appropriately. Tags can appear in a Deviation title, description, and list of keywords. They are what is fed to the site search engine. If you don't tag an image, it won't come up in a search. Besides: Through my severe obsession with search and ranking functions, I have discovered an astonishing thing: The Deviation title is by far the most important place to tag an image.

For instance, my Deviation: "Robin Hobb: Jhaampe" currently comes up as no 5 in searches for "Robin Hobb" - even though there are a number of illustrations of Robin Hobb's work that have considerably more fave's, including at least one Daily Deviation. Experimentally, I have tried to call the image just "Jhaampe": even though the tag "Robin Hobb" still appears in the description and keywords, the image suddenly goes down to somewhere way down the page for this search. So: Tagging matters!

4. Commenting and fav'ing other Deviant's work. This is the fun part. Of course, it can also become a major eater of hours! But there is absolutely no substitute for getting involved and genuinely participating in the community. I always check out the galleries of each person who comments on or fave's my artwork - sometimes briefly, but if I like what I see, I do it more thoroughly, fave some works or even add them to my Watchlist. Chances are that if they like your work, you might like their's! There also is an unspoken etiquette that views or comments should be returned, and many people will post a "thank you" for a fave on your gallery home page. Tick, one pageview.

This is really the core of what DeviantArt is about - to enable artists in far flung corners of the world to get in touch with each other, and share inspiration, interests, tips, tutorials, and yes, even cooking recipes and dating advice! It is absolutely and entirely possible to form genuine friendships online. That, I can vouch for.

5. Using the journal. Not just to write up regular entries - one of the most popular DeviantArt customs is to do journal features. They can be about a particular topic, or just a bunch of works you like. They can be your own work, or that of other Deviants. But, and this is important to remember: Featuring other Deviants is by far the better promotion strategy of the two.

When I do a feature, I send a note to every artist I've included, to let them know about the feature. Not only are they very likely to pay a visit to my gallery to see themselves featured, they might also let their friends know about it. And, they might include me in a feature of their own, next time they are doing one. Gratitude can go a very long way.

6. Writing up news articles. News articles can be submitted by any Deviant and appear in a dedicated news area, not on an individual gallery page, though they can be linked from there. This is very similar to using the journal, except that news articles may not be used for exclusive self promotion, and should be on a topic of general interest. A number of the journal features I have done, I have posted as a news article as well.

7. Giving critiques. This feature is only available to subscribers. Critiques are a fairly recent feature - they are similar to comments, but they require a minimum word count, and should be somewhat in-depth, constructive comments on an artwork, not just "it's nice". Many Deviants use the site to get feedback and improve their skills, and this feature is designed to encourage the giving of detailed feedback.

Critiques do have their own channel on DeviantArt, they also get submitted to my Watcher's message centre, as well as to the page of the artist I'm critiquing. If that artist is someone who gets considerably more pageviews than I do, I win, all the way! Besides, there is less competition - critiquing doesn't seem to be a thing a lot of people are very comfortable with.

8. Joining clubs or groups. DeviantArt used to have an informal system of clubs. Very recently, Deviantart has finally decided to officially support clubs - now called groups - and set up some technical features which make the administering of a group a whole, WHOLE lot simpler. In essence, a club or group is like a DeviantArt gallery, except that is doesn't display an individual artist's work, but the works of all their members, who share a common interest of some sort. There are really big and broad groups. such as "Digital Artists" or "The Pencil Club", and there are small niche groups such as, well for instance, my own "Ursula Le Guin" group.

The whole idea behind submitting your work to a club or group is, of course, to get it seen by the other members of the group. Some clubs also run contests, post tutorials and technical advice, or offer support and advice to their members. The ultimate in self promotion is, of course, to run your own group! Though it probably pays to get a bit of a feel for the DeviantArt community before setting oneself up as an expert in something. :)

9. Using the Forum. I have to admit that the only part of the forum I use regularly is the Deviation Thumbshare - as the name implies, here you can submit thumbnail images of the Deviations you wish to promote. You can open your own thread - but beware, you'll have to reply to all the posts you'll get! - or you can submit to someone else's thread. There are always a million threads along the lines of "post your newest", but every once in a while, someone is looking for something specific - often for a feature - like "Dragons" or "Pencil Works" or "The colour red".

If you manage to get your post in while the thread is still short, you're lucky, and some other forum users might have a look at your gallery. Otherwise, you'll just attract the attention of whoever opened the thread. Not the most efficient promotion strategy, but it usually gets you a few views, and sometimes you get lucky and someone features you.

10. Getting a Daily Deviation. Daily Deviations are featured on the Deviantart main page for a day, and can be suggested by any Deviant to the responsible gallery director. From what I have seen, they tend to explode your pageviews and fave counts overnight. I haven't got there yet, but I will report on what happens when I do. This is the ultimate achievement in online promotion on DeviantArt, of course!

I've written up these strategies with a particular online community and its specific features and culture in mind, but it is easy to see how these strategies can be applied to online promotion in more general terms.

Several of them come down to what any good SEO expert would tell you:

• - Quality of content - sometimes also called relevance


• - Regular and reasonably frequent updates


• - Keyword placement and tagging


• - Using promotional tools - e.g. submitting your site to industry specific directories, or contributing to topic specific forums - and getting links to your site

But some of the most successful strategies have to do more with your soft skills:

• - Networking, and genuinely engaging in your online community


• - Added value content - such as journals or blogs - especially if they contribute to building an online community


• - Promoting yourself through helping others promote themselves

It's not just about what you can get - it's just as much about what you can give!

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