I’ve just added findanillustrator.com to my blogroll over on the left. It’s basically a wall of illustrators and each image is a link to their info. I update it every time I update the rotating image on Hai!.
I’m planning on redesigning this website blog at some point to be more of a portfolio for my web design work.
I was doing a routine update of Hire an Illustrators when it made me think - what inspires an art director and what do they look for?
Most of the time they’ll have something specific in mind while they browse the site, but normally won’t know it until they see it. Even if they do have a clear idea of what they are after, it is not always that easy to articulate a vision. Quoting Anna Goodson, what she looks for when searching for illustrators to represent is “love at first sight”. Are art directors inspired by the work they see around them or do they lock themselves in an empty room only allowing original ideas to formulate. I know some film directors will not watch any movies for a period of six to twelve months before they begin a project, but I don’t think this is the case for art directors. I think in most cases they allow themselves to be enveloped by the industry they work in. Directing this question at illustrators - could your work has have inspired an international advertising campaign without ever being a knowing part of it? I think the answer is yes. How many times have you been referred to other illustrators sites, being asking if you could produce something that looks or feels like this (the work of another), I know I have as a web designer.
Looking for someone to turn your vision into a tangible work of art? Check out Hire an Illustrator.
I was recently questioned by a client why their statistics and referrals on their new site had suddenly dropped. Although this is a regular occurrence on new sites - they seemed to be very concerned about it. As anyone would be if they had just invested a lot of money in a new website. I thought I had best explain why this was happening… Here’s an edited copy of the email I sent them.
Stats, look good to me! Don’t forget at the end of ***** and the start of ***** the site was new so lots of additional people would have been visiting it just to check out the new site. So unless you’ve been doing some major marketing that I don’t know about, the stats for ***** are going to be considerably lower than the months before. But looking at your stats your referral rate from search engines has increased over the period by a considerable amount, which I would say is more important than click-through advertising from other sites, because people have specifically searched for keywords. We need to get you advertising on the right sites and places now if you want to continue to grow. The stats are great for analyzing the site to see what people spend the most time looking at and what the most popular pages are, also for if people have problems with any of the pages and where they are coming from. But at the end of the day you only really need potential clients looking at and being able to find the site and that may mean that only say 5-10% of your visitors are the ones you actually want. You need to find a way to monitor the number of people that visit your site in relation to the ones who become clients. If only 1500 people visit your site in a day, but only 100 of them are in a position to be a potential client or are already you can forget about the other 1400 visitors or even have a moan about them for slowing down the site while your clients where viewing it, but then again they might turn round to their ***** friend and recommend you to them
. The larger numbers don’t matter, but stats are nice numbers to show off. Maybe your site stats are something your accountant could take into account when doing your books to see if there is a direct correlation between the two.
I’ve always used StatCounter to monitor stats. It allows me to quickly look over all of the 15 plus sites I run in one hit, but I wouldn’t recommend it for business sites with a long-term business plan. If you need your charts and numbers to go with your annual business review I would recommend phpMyVisites as a self-hosted stats system. Google Analytics is clever, but I find it to be a bit overkill and from my past experience I’ve found it slow a sites loading times considerably even with the Google codes at the end of the site code so they load last.
If you’re a small time illustrator stick to StatCounter, but if you’re an Artist or Illustrator for a living you should seriously be using something like phpMyVisites. Look at your paid-for referrals to make sure they are getting the visitors to your site, but more importantly ask the people who commission you how they found your site so you understand how it works, your stats won’t tell you if they found you in a magazine. Look at your books - if your income drops but your hits are on the rise or vice-versa, don’t panic and wonder why! Look closer at them. Look for patterns there may be a direct relation between a rise in traffic from a certain site and an increase in commissions. If 100,000 people visit your site but only one of them becomes a client you’re not attracting the right type of people, also please note everything I’m saying in this post only applies if your site is up-to-scratch and easy to navigate. Numbers don’t matter, people matter!
More importantly networking should be higher up on your agenda that your hit counter, but I’ll talk about that in a future post.
If you look down the bottom left hand side of my site below the links you notice I’ve started to import some of the RSS feeds for sites I’m currently running. There’s no particular reason to do this as I don’t think it helps Google find them and I use a handy service called Netvibes to keep track of a large number of site… A very large number. At the end of the day I think it looks cool!
The sites I’m importing are the LCS, Hire an Illustrator and We Don’t Do Spec. I’ve got a few more up my sleeve, but that will do for now.
Are you so reliant on the way you have your computer setup and the files it contains that you’re are unable to work without it? I thought about this for a long time and could not see anyway around it considering the number of websites and projects I run and the number of people who rely on me for support. I’ve always tried to work in a way that allows me to throw what I need on a flash stick then off I go, but sometimes that’s just not enough. A few months ago I found the perfect solution!
I have a mini USB powered 160GB portable hard drive and I use a software suite called PortableApps.
Give it a go! - portableapps.com
The freedom allows me to run 24/7 and have a life!
