A few weeks ago I was putting together freelance query packages to send off to various publications when I realized how important it was to have a strong online presence. Many artists have LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook fan page profiles, but having your own personal website is really important to strengthen your brand, show your work and tie all of your online activity together.
Building a website isn’t as hard as it looks, but there are a lot of really crappy personal webpages out there. Here are a few do’s and don’ts to build a successful personal site.
Think About Your Brand
Are you funky? Classic? Modern? Clean? It can be difficult to put yourself into a box, but try to consider your core audience. If you’re an interior decorator trying to attract a high-end client, you may want a site that looks modern and uses colours that are on-trend. If you’re a game designer, cool apps on your site would impress your techno savvy peers. Of course, a great website isn’t made overnight, but it’s important to have some end result in mind.
In addition to the visual aspect of your brand, showcasing your personality is also encouraged. On my personal site, I decided to create a ‘News’ section that is part blog, part portfolio. My newer online work is showcased there, but I also discuss some business-related topics as related to my own experience (make another blog for photos of your kids of pets).
I personally quite enjoy reading the ‘About Me’ page on artists’ sites as well. Consider it a cover letter, or, at least, another chance to showcase your writing abilities. Again, skip over the personal details. In this case, I chose to combine the stories of my forays into both written and film work.
Choose Your Best Work
On my webpage, I divided my written and film work onto two separate pages. Take a good, hard look at your own work and choose only two or three pieces per category. Most potential employers are extremely busy and don’t have time to sort through your entire portfolio. A compromise on this is my aforementioned ‘News’ page, where those with more time (and interest) can peruse my latest work.
I also put clear headings on the page for my written work classifying the articles into ‘newspaper’, ‘online’ and ‘magazine’ categories. That way, depending on the type of publication this potential employer works for, your work is clearly laid out for them to see. However, I chose to simply put click ‘here’ with the link, rather than use the full description of the piece and break up the text. Feel free to try out certain styles that work for you and include the description if you want. Some links lead to another page, one leads to a .jpeg file of a newspaper clipping, and some digital magazines are all embedded on their own page.
Expect To Work Hard
Like I said, great sites aren’t built overnight. My own site took about 12 or 15 hours to make and it still isn’t quite finished. Work on it for a few weeks before sharing it on your Twitter or Facebook feed and put some really good content on it. One fabulous but sneaky tool that I’ve found with my personal host, Squarespace, is the ability to backdate or time posts. This means that I could potentially write a post and change the date to a few days before if I so wished to make the site look older. Of course, it’s better to do this initially before you get much traffic. However, using timed posts is great because you can write a few posts in advance and schedule them to go out at different times of the day, making it appear like you’re working non-stop like a good little freelancer.
One side note on your choice of host: please, please, don’t use WordPress unless you can make it look really, really good. Woodpress is very popular due to ease of use, but most of the free templates look like exactly that — free. You can purchase some templates or ask a designer to work within the WordPress engine, just don’t let your site end up looking like this — boring and unoriginal, the worst things for an artist to be connected with. Full disclosure — CAC is run on WordPress (don’t you love the new look?).
For some great examples of profiles pages, check out Ann Rea‘s page and Amy Krouse‘s. You can see my site, still a work in progress, here.
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Nice start to your site. How did you settle with or find out about squarespace?
Good article. Artists have to realize, that today they have the opportunity to announce to the world (for very little expense) that they exist. By embracing the Internet in its various forms of networking and marketing, recognition for what they do becomes easier to express. Allowing more time to spend on the creativity aspect of being an artist as opposed to pounding the pavement with submissions in hand.
Hey guys! Thanks for the comments.
Tim, a friend recommended Squarespace to me and I quite liked it because it reminded me of using Frontpage back in the day. Very easy to use as a ‘see what you’re doing’ editor but you can also mess with the html as well. It’s not too expensive either – for UnNomDeGuerre (my bigger blog) and my personal one I pay about $30 for both. UNDG is a bit more expensive because I have multiple logins for my writers.
Thanks for the compliment Franklin! I definitely agree with you on the power of marketing and creating an online presence. Not having to constantly update all of my social media nonstop (other than perhaps sending out links to my page with Hootsuite) saves me a lot of time and let’s me work on other things!