Get your web here
Whether you need a web site, have one that needs sprucing, or need help finding your customers and fans, 4emphasis can help carve out your unique web presence. We don't believe that flashy and expensive necessarily equal successful. Instead, we want to identify your unique needs, and create simple, elegant, agile, and fun sites that work. While we specialize in sites for small businesses, artists, crafters, musicians, writers, and crackpot geniuses, we are willing and able to handle any need that you can throw our way.
Find your fans: how creatives can leverage the web
The top ten "website shoulds" for creatives
- Keep your URL simple and easy to remember or spell. Using www.yourname.com is always a great choice, if your name is uncommon enough to be available, but common enough for folks to be able to spell.
Don't be afraid, though, to go with something creative, as long as it is related or suggestive of your brand, music, work, or product. - Pay attention to design. Writers, I'm especially looking at you...I know you deal in words, but a website that is attractive to look at does count. Think clean, simple, and easy to navigate at the very least.
- Consider what is most important for your users to be able to find and to know--and make sure that information is "above the fold." Don't make users scroll to the bottom for the most essential stuff.
- For the love of all that is holy, don't have anything flashing, dinging, or pop open automatically on your site. And musicians, I know music is your thing, but having a soundtrack begin as soon as someone opens the page is just irritating. Allow them to play your samples when they are ready.
- Don't rely on Myspace, Facebook, Linked in, or any of those as your main page. I know it's a no-brainer, but at the very least, buy yourself a URL, design and implement a nice looking "splash" page, and link to your profile from there.
- Before you publicize your new site, test it. Open it in Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera at the very least. And look for typos! Have a pal or your high school English teacher read over everything before you shout out your URL from the mountaintop.
- Blogs are awesome. But your creative blog is not your personal blog. Keep the content relevant to your work.
- Links are your friends. In fact, link to your friends. Ask them to link back. Most search engines sytill use a crazy proprietary formula to determine a site's search ranking, and a large component of that is dependent on how many places link to you.
Don't go nuts, though, submitting your link to bottomless directories or off-topic sites. You won't wind up higher in rank. You may end up with a mailbox full of spam, though. - The truth is, the bigger the web grows and more dependent we all become on it, the most information overload we suffer. Many people help crunch their daily reads down using an RSS reader. Make the content on your site available as a RSS feed (in fact, if you use almost any of the blog platforms already out there, an RSS feed is built in for you!).
- Do give us a sample of what you do on your site-be it via a sample story, a portfolio of your work, a music clip, or photos of things you've made. Then point us to where we can buy more of it.
