Hey there challengers - hot on the heels of last weeks branding task it’s an exciting and super important task for week #8 that is crucial to your illustration success…
This Week’s Task
Your task for Week #8 of the zero2illo 12 Week Challenge is to set up your portfolio website.
This Week’s Advice
As an illustrator, your portfolio website is your main weapon in your marketing arsenal, this is where you’ll ultimately succeed or fail. Yes, it’s that serious.
You are unlikely to be meeting potential Art Directors or customers face-to-face and you may never even speak to them on the phone – so the one thing that will convince someone to hire you or buy from you is going to be your website.
If ever there was an area to scrimp, bootstrap and make compromises, not just on cost but on time and effort – this is most definitely not it.
Your portfolio website is your storefront. It has to invite prospective clients and buyers to look more closely, it has to be easy for them to find what they’re looking for and it has to encourage and enable them to hire you or make a purchase.
As web designers & developers ourselves (as well as having run a business solely online for the past 3+ years), we’ve learned an awful lot from personal experience as well as having advised and worked with clients from multiple industries.
If we’ve learned one thing it’s this:
‘Don’t design your site for you, design it for your audience.’
On that note, let’s move on to the more practical & technical side of things. Here are a few tips we’d suggest having built html-based sites, Blogger-based sites, Typepad-based sites and Wordpress-based sites over the past few years:
- Use self-hosted Wordpress (not Wordpress.com) if you want to be able to control your content & site without having to constantly pay someone else to do stuff for you.
- Choose your hosting account carefully. You want one that (a) supports Wordpress and (b) gives you the control you need over your domains and hosting options without having to call or email support. Oh and you ideally want a service which provides support via email or live chat functionality for speedy replies to any questions you have.
- Your design and content are of equal importance but play different roles – one (hopefully) gives the right first impression and helps people find more to look at, the other (hopefully) confirms that first impression and keeps people there looking for longer.
- We’ve worked with free, customised and premium Wordpress themes; we’ve tested themes from Woothemes, ThemeForest, Thesis and Headway. The one we love and now work exclusively with? Headway. It makes *everything* super simple for even the non-techies amongst you – it’s that simple, just check out Lea’s tutorial video below to see why.
- If you have completed last weeks task, you’ll have a fresh, new, shiny brand. Ensure that the branding of your website is consistent with this. If not, why not? What can you do to ensure a consistent look & feel?
- Make sure each illustration in your portfolio has it’s own url so that it can be easily linked to.
- Make it super easy to find your illustrations (the main reason an Art Director or customer came to your site in the first place) - better still have them on your home page.
- Optimise your images so that they load quickly.
- Don’t bury your contact details deep within the structure of your site.
- Don’t use flash on your portfolio site - if an Art Director has to sit through a fancy animated intro sequence (regardless of how cool it might be) or wait for your site to load before they can view your work, chances are they will move on to the next illustrator in line (of which there will be many)
- Don’t have a pointless splash page that visitors have to click to enter your site - visitors should be able to get to the information they are looking for (your work and contact details) in as few clicks as possible.
If you are a complete non-techy, fear not! This task is not as scary as it seems or sounds and the resources and tutorials that we’ve created for you below are designed to make it even simpler and give you step-by-step help – just work through them one-by-one.
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. These are the *only* resources and services we recommend which is why we’re affiliates.
- Recommended Web Hosting: Bluehost [aff]
- How To Install Wordpress (in Bluehost) - PDF Tutorial
- Recommended Premium Wordpress theme: Headway [aff]
- Lea’s Headway Tutorial Video
- Premium Headway Designs: Premium Headway Skins
We’ve organised a 25% discount with the creators of Headway especially for 12 Week Challenge participants. All you have to do is go to the Headway site and use this code: 4C1E5C3584
If you do need extra help setting up your website, we also offer personal tech coaching but the above guides & tutorials should be enough to help you get the job done yourself.
Have fun with this task and take it seriously - it’s crucial to your success as an illustrator!
Related posts:
I’m impressed by Headway! It is really awesome. I’ve been using Dreamhost, what you guys think about it?
André.
Should be mentioned here: http://www.indexhibit.org
Supereasy, all about the work and fully customisable.
Just another FREAKING AMAZING week! Sooo pumped to roll this out! Thanks a ton for the discount that makes a huge difference along with all the support. This is great!
@André - Headway really is great and offers so much flexibility in terms of design and functionality. I haven’t used Dreamhost personally as we have always used Bluehost because they work so well with Wordpress and make life so much easier.
@Klaas - Thanks for pointing out indexhibit. It is indeed another option that should be considered. I have looked into using this myself for my portfolio in the past but in the end found it too limiting with it’s left and right system.
The beauty of Headway is that you can design a site to look exactly how you want it rather than it being fixed by the way an application works.
I found that all indexhibit sites look pretty much the same even when dressed up with fancy graphics. This is a problem I also found using other free and premium Wordpress themes until we started using Headway first for our web design clients and now for my own portfolio website.
@Brian - Wow, what great feedback! Glad you’re finding the discount and resources useful Brian. I promise to reply to your email this week btw - you suggested so many great ideas, I’m still digesting them
Hi Jonathan,
Great tips as usual.
Curious why you mention to not use Wordpress.com?
Thomas
@Thomas James - Wordpress.com doesn’t allow you to use plugins or custom themes.
@Jonathan - I see. Dreamhost has a nice quick install option for wordpress, but I never tried Bluehost either.
@Thomas - Thanks Thomas - Re. wordpress.com along with the important points André made, it’s also just safer to ensure that you have full control over your site (not just the look/design but the actual account itself) by having it on your own hosting account through wordpress.org.
As we’ve learned with Ning, it’s all very well using a free service, but if they remove the free option, you’re at the mercy of the company as to how much they decide to charge.
@André - Dreamhost sounds very similar to Bluehost with the easy install option. One of the reasons we also recommend Bluehost is that they have always been very responsive whenever we’ve had any problems.