Ok – it turns out my documentary is available in WHSmiths, un-edited and packaged with a book in a very neat looking bundle and as part of a series of videos on all kinds of subjects –whether these are done without copyright, I’ve no idea.

It’s still looking very much as though whoever released them has done so without the permission of Electric Sky, my distributors, and I’ve posted off a copy to them so they can take action….

What they can do about it, since the company publishing the DVD has now gone into receivership, I don’t know…

New year, new website
I’ve now got my new website set up – due to a very helpful company http://www.agdesignpro.com/ who I found on Elance – as part of my new year resolution to do more outsourcing.

The new site (at www.anachronistic.co.uk) is written in html, and optimised as heavily as I can for search engines.

I’ve learned a lot in the past few weeks about how to create a search engine friendly website. Including the whole CMS thing…

A CMS for those who don’t know, is a website within a website which only I can access, which allows me to add and remove content and new pages. The new pages will appear in the same style as the old ones with all the text and images pasted in correctly.

In other words, I can update my website at any time from any computer without knowing how to code or layout HTML. Brilliant, and surprisingly cheap to do.

So all the text (and there’s rather more than I would have liked) is in, and today I finished creating a new showreel which I’ve now uploaded….

I’ve chosen the Blue Danube as my music which I think works well….

Anyway, results:

Ok – it’s early days, the new site’s been up for a week (with the new showreel having gone in today), so none of the search engines have indexed it, and that means my visitors have stayed roughly level – OK, they’ve increased slightly from about 275 per day to 300 or so.

But my old site, in the first 3 weeks of the year ( remember, I’ve only just started advertising at the beginning of the year) generated 6 enquiries.

My new site has generated 8 in the 7 days it’s been up. That’s not bad, and apart from the new sales-centric layout, it’s a result of the little form I’ve created at the bottom making it very easy for people to contact me.

Whether that will help me actually get work remains to be seen….

Still. Onwards and upwards.

The next step is to wait for the search engines to recognise the site and see if that helps, but I’ve also discovered that your ranking on google depends heavily on the number of sites that link to yours.

I’ve written some features that hopefully will attract people linking, but I’m also planning to hire in a company to “build links” basically, they go out and actively find sites with similar subjects to your own and suggest that they link to the fantastic content on your site.

You have to watch out, because some of these companies link you to things called “link farms” which are sites set up just to provide links and Google takes a dim view of this. So the game is to get as many sites with content your visitors would find interesting to link to you as possible. It’s sensible and useful, so I’m going to give it a go.

The tips section of my site (http://www.anachronistic.co.uk/tips.php) contains articles for people interested in CGI and animation for their own projects, so it’s a worthwhile link to have.

And of course, I’ve just linked to it from my blog, so that give me another incoming link!