The Gig Economy: do we love it?
I read something recently to the effect that our being required “to continually reinvent ourselves for work and to anticipate constant change and to celebrate that as freedom” is the ultimate tyranny. Some thoughts on whether tyranny and freedom are mutually exclusive...
Google wants you to migrate to HTTPS
Google is warning all owners of websites to migrate to HTTPS to improve the security of online activity. Failure to make this change before October will result in red warnings appearing on insecure web pages and a drop in page-rank for your website. Migrate before October to protect your website's security and effectiveness.
Best Image Sizes for Your Website or Blog
Every image situation on a website is different but you always want your images to look good and to load quickly. Here we consider different priorities for different situations to help you get the best results for your website.
how to resize images for your website in photoshop
If you upload images from your camera directly to your website, you’ll probably end up with one or both of the following two problems: (i) the images will be extremely large in terms of file-size and make your page load slowly (this is annoying to your visitors and will cause people to abandon your site […]
Marketing and Higher Purpose Make a Great Couple
Richard Vevers switched from an advertising career to saving coral reefs and set up a non-profit organization which “uses the powerful combination of new technology, media, partnerships, and above all creativity to work at a meaningful speed and scale”. When you’re doing good work of any kind, getting the word out amplifies the benefit of what you are doing. Most non-profit organizations and artists would do well to develop a better marketing effort.
optimizing images for search engines
If you are having a website developed for you or if you are developing one yourself, it is worth paying attention to how the images that show up in Google image search get to be there. Not just for image-search but for the general search engine optimization of your image-rich pages.
how to use google analytics and search console: an introduction to the easy goodies
Two of the things I routinely do when creating new websites is set the site up with Google Analytics and register the site with Google’s Search Console. Google Analytics are far and away the best tool to learn about the actual effectiveness of your website. The first good thing about Google’s counting of visitors to your site is that, unlike many web statistics tools, Google filters out the robots and web-spiders that visit your site and only counts visits from humans.
artist website design - what to look for
When artists first contact me to see if I can design them a website, they will often provide a few urls of sites they like by way of reference. This is helpful, as it gives me a good sense of what their aesthetic is and what their expectations are likely to be. So here are a few artist websites of my own choosing, with my tips on why I think they work well…
why does my website break?
Why does my website break? This seems like a good question to address for Halloween because it spooks people when their perfectly fine website suddenly ceases to work. Or even appear. It makes people wonder if someone has hacked into their site and done damage but generally that’s not the case. What’s much more likely is that some software in the chain between your website and your browser has changed and has created an incompatibility with your website’s previously-fine code.
how to write an artist bio or statement
I recently saw a wonderful play called Floydada for which the music was composed by an artist whose bio begins like this: “Composer Seth Bedford likes wandering the West Village in search of coffee and is passionately committed to daydreaming. He is entirely too enthusiastic about Mid-Century Modern design and architecture, 1930’s Weimar Kabarett, 1960’s French Pop, attempting to paint, and pretending to learn new languages. When he is not doing those things, he composes silly music and teaches elementary aged children to do the same.”
what’s important for a photographer portfolio website?
There’s still a need for every serious photographer to have their own personal website. Social sharing gives you good opportunities to expand your reach but your own website allows you to establish some gravitas around your photography practice. What do you need?
on building a twitter following
In the process of experimenting with Twitter, I’ve become a little wary of the culture of “building a twitter following”. Here's why.
