It's really been pressing on my mind recently that I need to start gaining myself a website presence ready for when I leave uni, and preferably as soon as possible to gain awareness before then. I attended an afternoon workshop today on setting up a website and how layout it out and keep it running.
We used Weebly as our platform for learning today but I think I'm going to make my website with Wix; Weebly is easier to use but I feel that Wix has more professional looking templates and layout options. We discussed saving images for web at 72dpi to keep file sizes small and protect ourselves against the work being stolen; I never realised that some people's websites are slow because they have uploaded the file sizes far too big and I don't want someone to put off looking at my work because it's being too slow.
Lizzy Stewart portfolio: layout research- simple and bold
I learnt all about SEO (search engine optimisation) and how to make a website more Google friendly and easier to find when people search it. The key is to keep the website simple and relevant with page titles and key words. Google analytics is also a great way to keep track of website visitors and data and it generates a unique code to integrate into a website to boost the SEO.
The key things to remember in a website are to have easy to navigate categories such as:
- Home page
- About/ artist statement
- Gallery
- Blog
- Contact
It is also a good idea to have links to external online platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs.
Julia Pott: sub category links- fun, interactive, organised
I really thought that creating a website was going to be a puzzling, frustrating and lengthy process but I really enjoyed today's session and I think I can get my website up and running in 2 weeks. The hard bit is resizing and saving images and thinking carefully about what text to add. I'm quite excited to set myself up- keep an eye on this space!
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