Tattoos.com Ezine - Tips for Tattoo Website Designers


Tattoo Studios and Artists your online presence - by Damian McGrath This page is free for tattoo artists and studios to use as a basic guide to making your life easier when it comes to getting more people to find you online for tattoo work and keeping your info up to date with a minimal of headaches. Use what you like, and email us any additions, suggestions or feedback you may have. Tattoos.com has been designing and hosting websites for tattoo studios and artists since 1995. Over the years we have learned a few things that can make you get more relevent traffic for your website, and make it easier for people to find you and keep in touch or recieve updates. Specifically we are talking about maintaining your online presence, which is to say, your career as a tattoo artist or studio owner and how to use online tools to assist you. This means separating your personal life online from your career online, and maintaining your online career presence as a regular part of your work. Don't be intimidated by this, it is simple to manage it and maintain it yourself and once you are used to doing it on a regular basis it really shouldn't seem like work at all. This help page, created by Tattoos.com, will attempt to cover a range of topics that will hopfully serve as a jumping off point for artists and studios to use as a basic guide to achieving a successful and manageable online career presence. We will cover how to make your website valuable, utilizing great online tools such as gmail, keywords on your website, social networking and registering your social network name, sizing your photos properly, and uploading them to sites to get more traffic and lastly keeping everything updated with a minimal amount of work and misery for you.
DO I NEED A WEBSITE? If I was asked this question in 1995 I would have told you definitely. It was the future, either you were part of the steamroller or part of the road. Fifteen years later, not so much. You can get by with a myspace and a facebook. However, consider the fact that you are branding yourself to myspace and facebook and basically enslaving yourself to their rules and following the direction they want you to go in more or less. So I still strongly suggest if you want to maintain and control who and what you are online then the best way to do that is still set up a website and maintain it yourself, it is not that costly or that difficult. For those of you that don't have a website and want to set one up we'd be happy to set one up for you, (plus all the extras you get from Tattoos.com like tech support and traffic from us). If you want to set up your own site, we will have some tips posted here to guide you on the next revision of this page (any day now, promise). HOW TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE VALUABLE - follow these three simple rules. Target a specific audience - For a tattoo artist or studio, your audience online consists of mainly two groups, your peers, or fellow artists, and your potential or current customers. Your website and social networking sites, (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc...) are great tools for maintaining contact with your audience and for you to maintain contact and see what your fellow artists are up to. Utilizing your website and networking tools to communicate with this audience is a simple matter that shouldn't take up too much of your time. You don't have to be rocket scientist to do all this yourself, you just need a basic working knowledge of computers and the internet. Later on this page, we will get more in depth on how to use the website and networking tools to achieve this objective. Make your information valuable - Once again your fellow tattoo artits and potential clients are the ones who find your information as an artist valuable. That information of course consists of most importantly, your most recent work, which is an ongoing showcase of your skills and level as a tattoo artist. The other information would be where you are working, how to arrange for an appointment with you, where you will be traveling to work, ie. conventions, or what artists or guests may be coming to work with you. Keeping this information fresh and up to date is key to its value. What is not valuable, is an extensive gallery of the last shop BBQ where the piercing apprentice got wasted and video clips of shooting off semi-automatic weapons in the local dump. Stick to the tattoo stuff really. Update your information - Tying this all together is the two-ton elephant in the room, keeping your information updated. So you built a website, so you started a twitter page and you are on the Facebook, but you don't update your website and you don't tweet and you hate the facebook because the news feeds consist of an aunt you haven't seen in 20 years announcing she is making a cup of tea. However, you will find if you don't try to bite off too much to chew, you can tie together website updates and social network updates and all of these pages can speak to each other and you can update just one of them, depending on what's appropriate, be it a tweet, a new facebook album or an event on myspace and without too much effort and it can automatically be updated on other networks. You can then let your fellow artists and customers know what's going on with your ever advancing at a breakneck speed career as a tattooist. If you do not have a website, Tattoos.com is all about setting one up and hosting it for you as well as assisting you in it's design or maintenance, for everyone from the individual artists to the largest of studios. If you have an existing website, and want us to assist in maintenance or even just help you get more traffic to your website, just email us at mcgrath.damian@gmail.com or call our office weekday afternoons from noon to five PM Eastern Standard time at 416-203-7399. We can send thousands of new clients to view your website every month for as little as 20.00/mo.
GMAIL AND WEBSITE TRAFFIC ANALYSIS Gmail - Short for google mail. Anyone can get a gmail account. But I already have email, you say. Fine, keep your email, and use it to send your friends cute kitten pictures or whatever else you do with it. USE the GMAIL to administrate your online presence. If you don't have a gmail, really, really, really get one and use it just for maintaining your online career presence. It is more than just email with a huge amount of storage, it is a powerful tool that you can use from any computer in the world online to not only send email, but send huge attachments (up to 20MB), store or create other documents (word, excel, presentation, forms, etc..) It has excellent spam filters which are very easy to use and its own built in search engine where you can just type part of a conversation from months ago and it will search and pop that email up for you in no time. Gmail also works seamlessly with other google tools such as google maps and external social networks and allows you to access them with your gmail user ID and password other topics . It would be best to setup your gmail account to a name similar to your name as an artist or to your studio name and to consider if you can finding a user ID such as billsmithtattoos@gmail.com or smittystattooshop@gmail.com or needled@gmail.com, you get the point, a name that's easy for people you deal with to remember, or associate with you or your shop. You may also want to read over the social networking section before setting up your gmail account. To set up your Gmail, just follow our link. Once it is all set up come back here and use you Gmail to work with other Google related functions. If you already have a Gmail Account, proceed on. Google Maps - If you have gone to google to look for a business, as many of us have , you have seen little maps pop up showing the business that is closest to you in the are, our Google Tips Page shows you step by step how to set up your studio or artist website with Google maps, so you can be found easily by many online potential clients. Google Analytics - Enterprise-class web analytics made smarter, friendlier and free. In plain english, sign up your website by going to google.com/analytics after you have set up your gmail account and it will generate reports for you of who accessed your site, how often, from where, how they got to you, how long they stayed, where they went on your site, etc. It will help you understand what is working and how your website is being used by your peers and potential clients. It's very simple to set up and very informative for you. Later on as you become more familiar with adding to or maintaining your website you will be able to look at the data and use it to help you make decisions on what direction to go with for additions or changes. It will tell you what your audience is interested in seeing and what content they enjoy or go to more often amoungst other valuable infortmation. It's very simple to setup and there are lots of tutorials and explanations that allow you to get as in depth as you like.
Keywords - Keywords are the way search engines find relevant websites for relevant searches. They are a tag that resides in the head of your web document. For example, if I was looking for a tattoo studio or artist in London, I would type tattoo artists london, or london tattoo studios. So by typing in keywords on your webpage, you are increasing the traffic directed to your website. Think of what a potential client would type in to find you if they never knew the name of your studio. The way to add your keywords through HTML, is simply go to the page you'd like to add your keywords, select the Insert menu, scroll down to HTML, choose Headtags, and select Keywords. Click on the picture on the right to see what your html code should look like.
SOCIAL NETWORKING A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called which are tied together by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, likes, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. We will be addressing your online career presence and not the presonal aspect of of it here. Myspace - is the OG of social networks. A great place for tattooist to display photos and albums and update other people on myspace as to your activities. If you don't have one set up already, where have you been? Get one setup as soon as possible. Perhaps with an appropriate name like we mentioned above in the Gmail blurb. Check out the Tattoos.com on myspace at tattoos.com/tattooworld If you already have a myspace account setup, you want to make sure you link it from your website and toor from other social networks, we will get into detail later on. Facebook - Initially developed by students for students to tell other students where to go to get drunk, it has now become a way for older people you used to be in a relationship with, to hook up online years later and send you photos of their kids to convince you that yes, finally, they are happy with their life and got over you. But lets look at the business side of it, from personal experience, I have created and used personal accounts and both groups and fan pages. For tattoos.com, I prefer the fan page. Go to Tattoos.com's Facebook to see what we're talking about. The fan pages major advantage VS. running a facebook group is I can embed my fanpage newsfeed on my website, showing readers of my website what it looks like wiith a direct link to join right from my webpage. Twitter - The "SMS" of the internet. Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. In countries all around the world, people follow the sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens—from breaking world news to updates from friends. How this applies to you, keeping your peers and clients updated. Even if you're not at the point that you want to use Twitter becasue you're not Ashton Kutcher or one of those chicks from "The View", it would be a good idea to register your artist or studio name with Twitter ie. twitter.com/tattoosdotcom before some other scoundrel does. This also applies to Myspace and Facebook. The basic lesson being, set them up now so you can use them later, before someone else does. Maybe try to keep your gmail, facebook, myspace and twitter name the same, so it is less confusing to you, your friends and your clients. Once you do have an account setup you don't have to use it just for your personal life or business, you can use it for both if you wish, but keeping within the mandate of this page we will just be dealing with the business end of pertaining to tattoo artists or studios. RSS Feeds - Actually more of an idea for larger sites that are updated often, an RSS Feed is most commonly known as Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. RSS is used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in one standardized format. (See Tattoos.com RSS Feed for an example of how it would look and make us your first feed). RSS solves the problem for people who regularly use the web by allowing you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually, but instead, the reader will allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use. The different feeds you choose can be read using different software such as RSS Reader, Feed Reader, or Google Reader, which can be accessed through your gmail account (see above for gmail information). The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly, and by starting your website's own RSS Feed, you are two steps ahead of the game! By doing this, you can keep your clients and fans updated on news about your studio, new artwork, special guests and anything in between, which in the long run will drive more traffic to your website.
SIZING PHOTOS Sizing photos for your website. Landscape/portrait photos - medium quality JPG's 400-800 px wide or high depending on the orientation. Thumbnails are automatically made by the social networks for your website or for uploading them. Tattoos.com you can upload your photo's and get our trafic that will go back to your website. Preparing your photos for web When taking photos with a digital camera, they will most likely be saved in the jpeg format. The compression scheme on a jpeg causes the image to lose detail and clarity each time the image is edited and saved. A few tips to protect the quality. Ideally a good sized photo to load quick for a tattoo portfolio should be a high quality .jp 600-800 pixels high or wide depending on if the orientation is portrait or landscape. If you plan on posting more than a dozen photos on each page you may want to make thumbnails to link your photos to so people can get a quick glimpse of many pieces of your work and pick and choose the type of image that most interests them. Make all your necessary edits in one session if possible, so you don't have to save it repeatedly, losing the quality of of your photo. If saving repeatedly - use the same settings with each save. This will result in less damage to your photo. It's a good idea to archive your photos in a separate folder since you never know if you make a mistake or need to re-edit or use image for a different purpose in the future. How to properly crop, rotate, and resize your images. Resizing your image may result in blurring, to make your image more clear, especially when creating thumbnails of your work, simply sharpen your image in photoshop using the sharpen command. Hitting sharpen once is usually enough. Don't have Photoshop or simply not sure how to use it? There is an easy, online photo editing program you can use called fotoflexer.com. This program allows you to make most of the edits you would use from Photoshop such as resizing your photo, cropping, sharpening, adjusting color contrast and brightness and any other commands you would need to set your photo up for your site. Simply upload your photo from the front page where it says "Get Started" and follow the easy, step by step tools to have your photo looking the way you'd like. This site also gives you the option to play around using a few of their own photos. From the bottom of the front page, click on one of the effects you'd like to work with and it will bring you directly to that editing option where you can play around and get the feel for using their tools and test your skills. Demonstrations are also available from the home page, giving you step by step instructions on a few different effects FotoFlexer has to offer. And, as always, don't forget to save copies of your images in case the photo you have saved doesn't turn out the way you had planned.
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Preparing your photos for web