New website
I’ve finally got round to updating my website – on Monday I put together and uploaded a new showreel and today I’ve been re-designing the still images side.

Updating your portfolio website always involves a little self-reinvention. Each picture or clip you decide to include goes a little way to building up the picture visitors will have of you. And if you use the site for getting work, as I do, then you’re not only saying who you are, but who you’d like to be. You’re not just choosing your best work – I’m leaving out quite a lot of my best work – you’re choosing the work that you think is most likely to get the future commissions you’re after.

And that means some tough decisions. I thought about how to restructure it long and hard – after all, from my google advertising, I’m getting (roughly) one enquiry per week from about 800 clicks. In other words out of 800 people visiting my site, 1 decides to email me. That’s OK in sales terms, but I should be able to improve on it. Not least so that I can reduce my advertising spending!

And the conclusion I came to was this:

My website up to now has been about me. It’s been a boasting forum for me to let people know what a great artist and animator I am. All the decisions I’ve made about what to put up there have been about showing off the strength and variety of my work.

But I don’t need to do that.

I don’t need to show people that I can do 3d design and animation – that’s clear from the pictures. I don’t need to impress the visitors to my site because if they’re going to be impressed, they will be anyway.

If they were artists or animators themselves, they’d be doing the work themselves so they’re not looking at the mastery of different techniques – they’re looking for examples of the kind of work they need.

What I need to do is show them that I can produce what they’re looking for – that they can come to me with a brief – however vague – and that I can transform it into something that will work well in whatever they’re doing.

So, up to now, my website has been divided into sections for prehistoric art, science images, animation, etc.

What I need is to focus far more on sales – and that means directing visitors to images that mean something to them….

Reconstructions
Business communication
Advertising images
Illustration
Web graphics
Education
Editorial

Each section will probably only contain a few images, and there will be some overlap, but they’ll be very finely aimed at specific clients.


For video work – I think I’ll only do one video, but I’ll include buzz-words to make it clear what some of the clips relate to

Documentaries
Web animations
Music videos
Advertising
Logos
Videogames
Visualization
Title animations

It’s not quite finished, but the majority of it’s up there…www.darkin.demon.co.uk