Every illustrator needs a consistent and professional illustration website. Your website is where art directors discover your illustrations and hire you.
With every man and his dog having a website, how can you make yours stand out, get found, and receive more work? Within this article you’ll learn how to create an epic illustration website. You will discover how to stand out as I give you ultimate dos and don’ts of what makes a good illustrator website.
Let Your Illustrations Do The Talking
To succeed as an illustrator, your work needs to be appealing, unique, and attractive. Regardless of your style, your website needs to let your illustrations do the talking. Customers and clients aren’t interested in anything else but your work. Contrary to this, they might read your About page, your blog or how to contact you. However, your website’s existence is to show off your illustrations. Don’t ever get this confused.
There’s several ways you can achieve let your illustrations shine. Remove gimmicks, keep your website background white, and remove distracting elements. Your website needs to have one main focus; your portfolio. Your portfolio of work is your best friend, and your website needs to treat it like this.
Create A Consistent Brand
If you take a little look at my website, you can see there’s a natural and consistent flow. I use two main colours of orange and grey, Poppins typography, with the same headings and main font size throughout. This keeps my brand recognisable in a crowded market. Flowing throughout my social media, email outlets, and other marketing avenues too.
With your website, make sure there’s a consistent flow. Having one page that looks completely different from another will lead to confused users.
Here’s a few things to consider with your website;
Your font: Use one font throughout your website. Not only should you use one within your website, this should continue right through your branding, from social media to your invoices. When choosing yours, remember that different fonts communicate differently. For example, Gill Sans communicates something completely different to the font of Georgia.
Your colours: What are the colours that you want to tie your brand together? Choose a maximum of 4 colours, and embed this into your illustration website.
Your website style and function: Make sure your structure and function is the same throughout your website. For example, if you have a footer on your homepage that displays your contact info, make sure this is replicated throughout all pages.
Make Your Website SEO Rock
Even though you may be a creative type (and not have the slightest bit of interest with SEO), it can make a huge difference with your website success.
SEO (search engine optimisation) is optimising your website so it essentially climbs search engines . Done right, when someone types in a certain keyword into Google, your website will appear in front of them. Google bots scan your website for the type of content that you create, and ranks for you certain keywords. There’s lots of factors Google ranks you for, from website speed, how appropriate your content is, to its quality. Website owners use keyword research to create content around keywords that specific users type into Google.
This is such an important part of any website, as people spend millions every year to rank websites higher in search results. It’s a massive industry, and should be considered.
One way you can drastically make a huge difference with your illustration website is with a blog. As Google loves content, having a blog on your website can leverage traffic, and help you create content that Google loves.You can share your new illustration commissions, your illustration portfolio or what you’re currently working on. You can start to target specific targeted keywords to help propel your illustration website in search results.
Simply speak to your web developer, or send me an email. (I can pass on your details to someone I know), and ask them to place a WordPress blog on your website.
Having a separate Tumblr or Blogger blog is great, but having your own blog on your website is ideal.
Bonus Tip: Show Your Contact Details
As users start to arrive on your website, showing your contact details is a good way to encourage people to contact you.
If you have a look at the top of this page, you can see my contact details show every page. You can easily access this information without too much difficulty.
Make A Massive Difference With Your Illustration Website!
I hope you have enjoyed this blog post about how you can propel your illustration website for your professional services.
Even though you may be a creative type, creating a structured and efficient website is crucial for your success, and I can’t recommend you doing these tips highly enough!
If you would like to see more of my website and illustration work, do have a look! I specialise in editorial, publishing to advertising illustration, and if you have an illustration project in mind, give me an email today!
Many thanks for listening and visiting my news page today. You can follow what I’m up to on my Twitter, Facebook or Google + pages, I’ll really appreciate it if you do, and don’t be afraid to say hi to me! Many thanks again, and have a great day!
28th March 2016
