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Marketing on The Internet
Survey Results - Marketing With Your Web Site
By Maria Piscopo

Survey Results - Marketing With Your Web Site

QUESTION: Based on your experience with your Web site, what design or copy elements have you used to increase response to your site? What has worked? What has not worked that you changed?

Robert McClintock, Photo/Digital Illustration, http://www.robertmcclintock.com

“I've had a web site for over three years and it’s always been useful to show people what I do but now I’m actively including my web site in my current campaign. Also I’m actually emailing people (graphic designers, art directors, agency people, and agents) and turning them on to my web site and portfolio on line. I write a few lines and even apologize for my spamming them. This is not point and click mass e-mailings, but very short personal two line notes with my hot link sent to people whom I have either met or been referred to. Many people actually respond with a thank you and they ask me to include them in my future promo card mailings. Another great thing about my web site is that I can call a client or a prospect and they can go to my web site and talk to me while we're on the phone looking together. I think some people like it as a way to keep me at a distance and not feel pressured. There are three factors I think I have going for me. One is that my site is visually easy to look at and navigate and know where you are and how to contact me. Two, my site is fast loading, all the images are well under 60 KB jpeg’s and the dimensions will fit onto any monitor. Third is that my site is not "state of the art”, there is nothing super fancy, no shockwave, no sound, no Java, no bull. I want people to look at my work and not get frustrated with my cool HTML tricks and slow loading graphics. I think of the WWW as a super highway with thousands of cars zooming by at 80 mph all day long and I’m a shiny hub cap on the side of the road which occasionally someone will see for a second out of the corner of their eye maybe it'll make them think about me or better yet maybe they’ll stop to pick me up because I might just fit.”

“My successful design and copy elements include:

1. Simple, fast-loading front page.
2. No confusing, distracting, slow-loading Java scripts.
3. Hitometer to keep track of hits and statistics.
4. Registration with search engines and photography sites.
I plan to put the photographs in frames with attached copyright notice so that any download of the photograph carries my copyright with it. I also plan to use keywords in the top quarter of each page to increase the probability of being found by search engines.”

“I have a description of each image, many times including the film and camera type. I include creative credit to let potential clients know I have worked with real agencies and on real accounts. I use five to ten "key words" for a key word search for each image. Just like my portfolios I am shooting tests for the website. I update at least 25% or three images on each site every three months. Clients keep coming back to see new images. I have been very happy with the Black and White images. They seem to stand up very well on the site. Of course the monitor capabilities need to be kept in mind. The most important part of making a website successful is the artist needs to realize it is only part of a planned and consistent marketing approach for her or his portfolio. The site needs to be part of a national advertising campaign (Planetpoint's print advertising campaign as an example) combined with aggressive marketing by the artist. E-mails that hyper-link to the artist website, post cards with the website's URL and continually updating images on the site are three of proven elements of marketing that will help make a website successful.”

“This is the second site that I have put up. The first was tailored to the ‘then’ fledgling Internet community (1995). The original site was very basic design, with very rudimentary graphics, small images, and a rather stark navigational interface. My current site is as state-of-the-art as it gets. The only thing that it is lacking is an audio component. We did not include audio because the connection speed for most users is still too slow to properly utilize audio.

The current site was designed to answer several requirements:
1. It must showcase my photography, not be a ‘gee-whiz’ look at the newest version 5.x software demonstration. I feel that a lot of sites fall victim to overly complicated graphics/software tricks that draw attention away from what they are selling.
2. I wanted it to be interesting, if it was your first, or twentieth time, I wanted the thing to not get boring
3. It had to be current, and its overall feel had to match my work.
As to the success of the site, my current site gets on average 80 hits per day. When it first went up, I was averaging over 200 hits per day (for 9 weeks), but now that it has been up for 11 months, it has backed off to a steady rate. In comparison, my old site yielded a yearly hit rate of 200 to 300 per year for the first three years it was up. There is an increase and overall general acceptance of the ‘net’ as a viable resource to finding talent. If the majority of art buyers and clients didn’t feel the need, or see the opportunity, to find new people on the web, I still would be in the 200 hits per year range.”