You're a visonary. You slave away solo creating masterpieces. Guess what? The get famous fairy isn't going to knock on your door.
You've got to knock down their door.
We're 4Emphasis, a teensy Seattle-based web development/design firm that specializes in building pages for artists, writers, musicians, and other creatives, as well as small business owners.
Creative people are often the most reluctant to toot their horns. Let us help you to not only tune that horn, but bring in the whole orchestra.
You've got to knock down their door.
We're 4Emphasis, a teensy Seattle-based web development/design firm that specializes in building pages for artists, writers, musicians, and other creatives, as well as small business owners.
Creative people are often the most reluctant to toot their horns. Let us help you to not only tune that horn, but bring in the whole orchestra.
Why you need a website...
...and how we'll try and make it painless
Let's face it--it's hard to find your fans.
They're out there, though. You just need to make it possible for them to find you.
Writers, we know that publishers are allocating smaller and smaller amounts to promoting new authors (and cutting budgets for established ones too!). Getting a reading is great, but only if you can fill the room.
Artists, maybe you've gotten some hangings at local coffee shops, but you're ready to start going after gallery shows and paid commissions-or your own line of t-shirts?
Musicians, you've worn out the soles of your combat boots rocking the local seed venues. Your Myspace page has 300 friends, but you want to sell 30,000 copies of your CD.
Indie crafters, you've sold at local farmers markets and holiday fairs, but you are ready to take your inventory nationwide...or even international.
This is a call to all creatives--wake up and smell the web, darlings. You've got to get savvy about pushing yourself into cyberspace. A polished website with personality and functionality and a marketing plan with savoir-faire are no longer optional. But getting on target--on a budget--and without it cutting into your creative time can be overwhelming (to say the least).
We've tried to gather here what we consider the best of the breed for you to begin with. Cut through the baloney and crap--below are what we tell our family and friends when they ask us.
We've also set up some pages just for writers, artists, and crafters to check out. We hope these tips and links are helpful, and if you decide that you need a partner in crime that you will think of us.
They're out there, though. You just need to make it possible for them to find you.
Writers, we know that publishers are allocating smaller and smaller amounts to promoting new authors (and cutting budgets for established ones too!). Getting a reading is great, but only if you can fill the room.
Artists, maybe you've gotten some hangings at local coffee shops, but you're ready to start going after gallery shows and paid commissions-or your own line of t-shirts?
Musicians, you've worn out the soles of your combat boots rocking the local seed venues. Your Myspace page has 300 friends, but you want to sell 30,000 copies of your CD.
Indie crafters, you've sold at local farmers markets and holiday fairs, but you are ready to take your inventory nationwide...or even international.
This is a call to all creatives--wake up and smell the web, darlings. You've got to get savvy about pushing yourself into cyberspace. A polished website with personality and functionality and a marketing plan with savoir-faire are no longer optional. But getting on target--on a budget--and without it cutting into your creative time can be overwhelming (to say the least).
We've tried to gather here what we consider the best of the breed for you to begin with. Cut through the baloney and crap--below are what we tell our family and friends when they ask us.
We've also set up some pages just for writers, artists, and crafters to check out. We hope these tips and links are helpful, and if you decide that you need a partner in crime that you will think of us.
The top ten "website shoulds" for creatives
Keep these in mind as you plan your web domination
- 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.
About us
Find 4Emphasis and its team on the web
- 4Emphasis
- Our main page
- spitkitten dot com
- Home page for writer Caren Gussoff, one half of the 4Emphasis team
- Chris Sumption dot com
- Home page for artist and designer Chris Sumption, the other half of 4Emphasis
We're on etsy!
The easy and safe way to get web that makes you w00t
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Tools we recommend to our friends and family
- Dreamhost hosting
- We really like these guys and use them personally. Plus, you can get a nice discount off your monthy or yearly hosting fees by using the promo code:
4EMPHASISSENTME - Livejournal
- LJ is a popular blog choice for good reason. It's free, easy to set up, and a great way to build a community of like-minded folks and fans
- Wordpress for your URL
- Simple to download, simple to install, simple to extand, and simple to update--Wordpress is still the king (imho) of open-source blogging software
- Blogger
- Google's Blogger platform is a fave of many. In minutes, you can have a decent-looking, fully functional blog, ready to rock.
- Webmonkey
- Where many of us first learned how to build web pages. If we could, so can you.
- CoffeeCup HTML editor
- We love freeware and opensource
- Amaya, the W3C's Editor/Browser
- Cool open source web editor
- Project Wonderful
- "Wonderful" is a perfect term for this service--Project Wonderful is an online advertising broker with an innovative model that brings fairness, transparency, and profitability to the advertising process.
Things for your toolbox
by 4emphasis
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