Why Your Website Matters

When it comes to creative pursuits, it can be tempting to think of them as being completely unlike a business. In fact, many people pursue a career in a creative field precisely because they want to avoid the traditional world of business. However, if you are serious about your art, you should think of it like a business, especially if you are hoping to make money from it like you would a business.

When you think about your art in this way, the advantages of having a website become more obvious. No sensible person would try and launch a business in the US today without a website to back it up. As an artist, your website will need to serve a number of functions simultaneously. Not only will it contain a gallery of your work to show to potential clients and customers, it will also give them more background about your work and tell them how they can contact you.

If your website is to be an effective tool for furthering your art career, you will need to think carefully about your design choices. The following are the most important aspects and features of your website to get right as an artist.

The Layout

Needless to say, you want a website that is simple and intuitive to navigate. From the moment that a visitor lands on your website, it should be immediately obvious to them what the different sections of your website are, and how to get to them. Your website will need to contain, at the very least, a gallery of your work, contact and commissioning information, some background information about you and your work, and information on any upcoming events or exhibitions you will be taking part in.

In many ways, designing your website is like producing a piece of art in its own right. Just as most artists have a specific workflow and process that they follow when making their art, it is similarly a good idea to approach your website design in an orderly manner. Begin with the top of your homepage as this is the first place that new visitors to your website will see, so it’s important that you make a good impression. An eye-catching logo, even if it’s just a stylized version of your name, is a good addition to have. 

Alongside your logo, include a summary of your contact information and make it clear that this is a website for your art. The goal is to ensure that a newcomer to your website who knows nothing of you or your art can ascertain all that information quickly and effortlessly.

Many people, especially those with limited web design experience, find that using a  website builder for artists is helpful in ensuring that the website they produce is laid out appropriately and easy to navigate. Format offers such a website building tool, which enables artists to easily produce a website that effectively showcases their work and is easy to navigate. There is still plenty of room for you to add your own flair to your website design. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

The Gallery

The primary function of your website is to encourage visitors to become customers and clients. In order to do this, you will need to include a portfolio or gallery as a part of your website. However, you should aim to make it more than just a collection of images because anyone can do that! Instead, think about ways that you can take advantage of the website as a medium.

You could design your gallery as a slideshow so that viewers click through your work and view it piece by piece. Adding some text around the images to give some background on the work and any other information you think would be of interest to potential patrons is a must. You will have to find a balance here though. On the one hand, the purpose of your website is to increase your exposure and generate commissions. However, if you make the text in your gallery too much like a sales pitch, you might end up alienating the very people you are hoping to attract.

The advantage of the slideshow approach is that it ensures that viewers see each image at a reasonable size, allowing them to resolve fine details. The drawback is that, if the first pieces in your gallery don’t appeal to viewer’s tastes, they might quit before finding work that they would like if they saw it. The alternative way of approaching your gallery is to make the whole thing visible as thumbnails and allow the viewer to select pieces they want to view full size.

There is no right or wrong approach, but you will need to consider which of these approaches is the most suitable for your style of artwork. Some artists’ work naturally lends itself to one of these methods, while others necessitate a particular approach. If, for example, your artwork involves lots of fine detail, it will be hard for a viewer to judge your work from thumbnails.

Formatting Images

One of the most common mistakes made by artists who have only limited experience with website design is that they choose an unsuitable image format for their work. Digital artists have an advantage here, in as much as they will naturally have a greater knowledge of the different file types and their respective properties. Artists who work in traditional mediums and then upload images of the work often upload straight from their camera or scanner without a second thought.

There are a number of different file types to choose from, each with its own ideal usage scenario. For example, if you use Photoshop at any stage when producing your art, you will have the chance to save the file as a PSD file. These files are great for saving work that you plan to work on later in Photoshop, but they aren’t suitable for your website.

You have probably encountered GIF files before, as many images and animations use this file type. However, any image with over 256 colors will lose quality when saved as a GIF. Your artwork will almost definitely contain many more colors than that, so while GIFs might be the standard for most image files, they aren’t suitable here.

The file type most important to the majority of artists today is PNG. PNG is less common than other image types, but it eliminates the drawbacks that are unavoidable with GIF and JPEG files. Unless you have a specific reason for using a different file type, you should upload all your images as PNGs.

Every artist needs a website. As an artist, you should already understand the fundamentals of good design. Apply the same rules that you would apply to your artwork to your website design, and you should be able to create something that is simple and intuitive to navigate, while also showing off your skills.

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Search engines are very clever. They not only have to deal with every website that appears, they also need to be able to do so in different languages.  SEO is not something that applies just to English-speaking countries: France, Spain, Italy, Austria, India, China, Germany and everywhere else in the world use SEO.

How Written Content Can Help SEO

There are many ways that written content can improve SEO substantially. In a lot of people’s minds, it is the main source of SEO improvement as it is the most easily identifiable asset for search engines to select. However, with so many millions of websites for search engines to consider, in so many different languages, they may still struggle to discover some sites.

There are a few ways that this can be remedied and you can make your site easier for them to find. For instance, possibly the most important aspect is keywords. This is something search engines heavily rely on to more easily identify worthwhile sites. Keywords should be connected to the topic to attract the audience you are after and should be included in titles, URLs, and headings as well as the content. 

Most countries have experts who can help you to utilize your content to its best advantage. Using France as an example, SEO consultant France Elodie Gythiel has a marketing background and believes that the most important thing is to localize your content. What works well in one country may not work so well in France. Customers have different cultures and websites need to take that into account. For example, bragging about commercial success will not be seen positively, while social initiatives could help build a brand locally.

Search Engines Using Videos and Images For SEO

Videos and images are sometimes overlooked when maximising SEO capabilities. Their use is becoming more and more prevalent as people become less inclined to read long texts. If there is a video or image to stimulate the reader’s imagination, this can sometimes benefit traffic and SEO. 

Some studies report that content with images gets 94 percent more views than content without, and there are even some popular platforms that revolve completely around images and videos. Viewers are also much more likely to share and link content if it contains something interesting to look at.In addition, videos and images can actually make it much easier to articulate points that a writer might be struggling to make.

Another large advantage of images and videos is that they can help overcome the language barrier.  A picture or video can say much without any language being involved; there is no need to use  Google Translate, if the content is in Spanish, Dutch, French or any other language because no matter which country viewer are in, they all see the same thing.

Does Social Media Affect SEO?

In today’s society using social media is incredibly crucial and many would argue that this is where sites gain the most traction, especially once they are large and have good traffic. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn allow for easy access to shared websites, and businesses can also set up their own social media accounts to directly advertise their services. 

Social media shares can lead to links, but all of this only comes if the content itself actually draws in well enough to justify users sharing it. If the content is good enough, not only is it likely to improve SEO, but it will also increase the life of the content itself and thus garner more traffic.  Dealing with SEO through social media is just another one of the many ways SEO experts help their clients to become a recognised brand and move up the search engine rankings.

Brand recognition is a massive part of the success of any business and the bigger and better your social media presence is, the more well-known your site will become. This can be very advantageous as people may award the site “verbal links” by bringing it up in conversation or mentioning it on their own personal social media pages.

Your presence on social media should always be positive and never ignored. Nothing upsets potential customers more than not getting a reply to a query.

Use a combination of written content (including the same keywords as on your website) with images, and videos. The combination of all three produces the best results for ranking results. So, in answer to the original question – yes, written content is still relevant for SEO.

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1. Timely Replies:

Today’s customers don’t want to wait around for a reply. The ease of access to information on almost anything online means that customers are increasingly demanding instant answers, allowing them to get the information that they need straight away and get on with their lives. Typically, a customer will expect a response within the hour when they contact a company with a complaint or query. But, research conducted recently found that under 20% of businesses respond to customer complaints via social media within one hour, while even more never respond at all. For your social media presence to be effective, it’s essential to work on your response rates. 

2. Live Chat Services:

Many customers will agree that the whole point of a business being present on social media is to provide live customer service options. In fact, research shows that today, a huge percentage of customers prefer using live chat options over any other customer service communications, for example, telephone or email. There are several different options that you could consider for a live chat service; for example, if your business is present and active on Facebook, you could take advantage of the Messenger feature to provide real-time online assistance to your customers when they get in touch using the app or website. For a more professional service, consider using helpdesk software complete with IT asset management to keep track of both active and resolved issues. 

3. Protecting Your Reputation:

Social media can be a hugely effective tool for improving customer service standards, but it can also pose a significant risk to your company’s reputation if not used correctly. For example, one misjudged tweet could quickly become the downfall of your brand, or a long response time advertised on Facebook could put customers off from choosing your company over others. It’s important to ensure that you implement a number of policies to protect your reputation on social media. For example, it’s important to avoid situations where employees are allowed unsupervised access to corporate social media accounts as this runs the risk of inappropriate content being posted and damaging your reputation. 

Social media is one of the best tools out there for promoting your company, engaging with customers, and providing excellent customer service. But, it’s important to be more than simply present on social media sites to ensure that you get the most from them.

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Here are five very good reasons to transition to the digital arena.

1. Efficiency

One of the main reasons to go digital is in terms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). This can be accomplished with Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or with one of the most innovative resource management platforms, Kanban Lean, which falls roughly in between a SaaS or a PaaS. Everything you do in both the front and back end of your business goes through the Kanban board online though, which literally every department can access to pick up their assignments in the form of a Kanban card. These digital cards have two sides. The front-facing side shows the employee’s name and lists their primary job. This can be expanded into subsets, but on the back are the specific steps/duties, which must be carried out. It’s an amazing way for anyone with access to see just where everyone is with their assigned tasks.

2. Reach

Going digital also helps to expand your reach. If you don’t have a website now, isn’t it time you had one developed for you? Whether you are catering to a local market or trying to reach a global market, the Internet is the surest way to be found. There are a huge number of digital marketing strategies to broaden your reach, but unless you are online, there really are few ways prospective and current customers can find and communicate with you.

3. Brand Identity

If you aren’t looking to hit the market as a one-shot-wonder, brand is of vital importance. You will want your customers to identify with you, which is vital for return business. It is a fact that Millennials want to deal with businesses that are more than just product pushers; they want to do business with brands that make a difference. Unless you build a brand based on sustainability and perhaps philanthropy, you will miss out on a huge part of the population with buying power. Bear in mind that the majority of new customers are found online, so that’s where you should develop your brand.

4. Waste Reduction

At the heart of Lean is waste reduction. With an online Kanban board, you can hope to eliminate the majority of waste at your place of business. From doing more in the digital realm to working from a Kanban board, a great deal of time, energy, and resources are conserved. You’ll be using far less paper, you can keep employees on task through their Kanban cards, and reduce waste in time and effort when communicating with staff members. The digital realm helps you do away with those tiresome meetings altogether. Set up regular video conferences online or communicate via the Kanban dashboard messaging system. If you are looking to maximize profits by reducing waste, it doesn’t get any better than this in the digital arena.

5. Transparency

There are two ways of looking at transparency. While the term is most often used with reference to financial matters, transparency also relates to steps and stages in a process or work task. Working in the digital realm with Lean systems like Kanban can make all the necessary information readily accessible to anyone involved. If any member of your team is about to complete a project, they can quickly access upcoming work so that they are ready to start work on their new tasks the minute they complete their current tasks. It also helps to know if there is a holdup ahead of you so that you can plan better use of your time in the event your part is not ready for several hours or days. This is transparency from the back end.

Your Key Takeaway

Finally, the one thing you can typically count on when working in the digital realm is that you can easily access your tasks from home if you are thinking about ways to improve your productivity levels. While you may not be able to actually work from home or at an Internet café, you can better plan ahead by knowing what’s coming up. Going digital helps you on the clock and off, but in the end, the two main benefits are efficiency and waste reduction.

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What is an Applicant Tracking System?

An applicant tracking system is also commonly referred to as ATS.  This software helps screen potential candidates and manages the entire hiring process.  These systems are web-based and usually found within the umbrella term of ‘talent management’. You can click this link for more info on some of the best application tracking systems. 

How do Applicant Tracking Systems Work?

Like the vast majority of business software, application tracking systems revolve around automation processes.  When an applicant applies online, all of their information is collected in a centralised database. This database holds everything from education backgrounds to application questions and even cv’s.  An ATS will easily sort through all of this information and present you with the top applicants.

An applicant tracking system does not just automate the company side of things.  It also automates communication to applicants by sending them automated messages.  These automated messages can tell an applicant when a company has received their cv, as well as send an invitation for an interview or send a rejection email once someone has been hired.

Here are five signs that you need to consider testing out an applicant tracking system.

1. You’re spending a Lot of Time Submitting the Same Job Ad to Multiple Job Sites

If you are hiring for a tricky to fill position, you’ll likely have to get your job ad on a variety of the best job posting sites.  Each of these sites will come with different posting mechanisms.  The better ATS systems will enable you to post on multiple job sites with a single submission.  This is guaranteed to save time per hire.

2. Irrelevant Applications from Candidates are Inundating Your Inbox

This is the number one headache when hiring someone new.  Often, companies will lose huge chunks of time sifting through dozens of irrelevant applications from people that lack the necessary skills for the role.  An ATS can help in a few ways.  First, you will have customisable application forms where you will be able to include screen questions.  Secondly, a top-quality ATS can also deliver structured information about each applicant, which makes disqualifying candidates easy and hassle free. 

3. Your Hiring Team is Having Problems Co-ordinating Feedback

If your business only has one person handling recruitment, it will likely be the responsibility of your inbox to let you know if your current process is working or not.  However, when you are part of a hiring team, and you are not using an applicant tracking system, this is where you can run into difficulties, because you will be getting messages from all directions.  This can often cause headaches.  An ATS will easily cover sharing notes, evaluations of different candidates, providing feedback, running different calendars, forwarding PDF applications and more.  Plus, with an ATS, all of this is done in one place. 

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