[Job Offer] Looking For Web Designer

[XPRTNovice]

Hi guys,

If you don't know, I'm a voiceover artist (apparently) and while I like my current webpage I think I made a bit of a misstep in branding. That page deals with a sort of amalgamation of what I do for side jobs; what I need, I think, is a dedicated voiceover page. I know there are huge amounts of savvy folk here, and your networks of savvy people are equally as huge - so I'm open to referrals as well.

Here are some examples of some of the top guys in the industry right now:

These first four were shown to me by a voiceover marketing consultant

http://fulginitivo.com/

http://www.jordanwiberg.com/

http://www.vayronmusic.com/

http://www.rockbarnvoices.com/

These four are people I know in the industry that are doing really well

www.jmcvoiceover.com

www.bradziffer.com

www.bradyhales.com

I'm really not looking for something complicated or something that mimics that exactly, but I'd like it to showcase my demos as well as my credits. I'm very open to ideas because I'm quite a bad designer - this will definitely be a dialogue process as well as a designing process.

And I am definitely not looking for anything for free. This is my primary source of income now, and I am willing to pay accordingly. If you have marketing experience as well and can help me re-brand, that's a bonus and you can include it in your quote (or you can tell your referral to include it in their quote).

A final warning - I am in the decision stage in this, not waving money around, but I promise you I won't be wasting anyone's time; I'll know pretty quickly whether or not I'll be purchasing the services offered and I am not above paying a design fee that can be reimbursed if I choose that designer for the full project (i.e. I pay someone $50, or whatever, to sketch out a design, then that $50 comes out of the total price I pay them if I hire them)

Thanks in advance!

Edited March 27, 2014 by XPRTNovice

[Meteo Xavier]

Your current website really isn't that bad, are you sure you want to throw down good money to have a site that looks like everyone else's that will serve you little real practical benefit other than you can say your site looks like the website of an industry leader in voice acting? Just because you're worried about your "branding"?

Not to begrudge anyone on here the chance of a paying job, but I really don't think you'd be getting any bang for your buck there. You just need to look for ways to attractively integrate demo reels into your website. Youtube, Tindeck, Soundcloud, etc. If you've got someone interested in hiring you for work, they're not really going to care about how crazy-awesome professional looking your site is going to be - in fact, the website you have now gives someone like me an indication you're affordable to hire. You go with a more expensive and fancy looking site, it will tell savvier employers that you charge a pretty penny.

You have a good start as it is, save your money and just rework it to how you want it to come off.

[XPRTNovice]

Your current website really isn't that bad, are you sure you want to throw down good money to have a site that looks like everyone else's that will serve you little real practical benefit other than you can say your site looks like the website of an industry leader in voice acting? Just because you're worried about your "branding"?

Not to begrudge anyone on here the chance of a paying job, but I really don't think you'd be getting any bang for your buck there. You just need to look for ways to attractively integrate demo reels into your website. Youtube, Tindeck, Soundcloud, etc. If you've got someone interested in hiring you for work, they're not really going to care about how crazy-awesome professional looking your site is going to be - in fact, the website you have now gives someone like me an indication you're affordable to hire. You go with a more expensive and fancy looking site, it will tell savvier employers that you charge a pretty penny.

You have a good start as it is, save your money and just rework it to how you want it to come off.

Meh, I totally hear you. This is pretty much the internal argument I've been having since my VO career took off; it was a bit unexpected. I built the studio site before that all happened, and now when I compare it to what the industry leaders are doing, it leaves me in a nebulous position, I think. I'm also going off some advice I've gotten from the folks whose links I posted, too. As I learn a bit more about the industry, I'm finding that the term "studio" implies something that, yes, I am, and can do, but not my focus. Most VO artists that are successful are tied to their names, not an LLC, which I think I've also done wrong. So there were lots of factors going into this.

Ultimately, I stand to lose the cost of the website with a chance of solidifying my brand as a VO artist, so it's a calculated risk on my part. At the minimum, I gain a little bit of fall-in-line-ism that helps me resonate with established professionals in the industry.

[BaconProcurement]

Right now I'm currently enrolled in a web graphic design course that I started this year and add my two cents to your website design. I don't think I'm qualified to take on the job as I just started out but from what I've learned so far I've see a lot of problems to your overall design.

First, the background is pretty bad. It's very distracting against your text. As a matter of fact, some of the text is being "blocked" by the drawing on the front page making it somewhat difficult to read. That isn't a good thing to do. Also the font style of the navigational tab clashes with the informational text. The font used as your heading of the website and tabs have a old-timey feel to it whereas the font giving information is modern and somewhat plain. It doesn't fit well with the background either. You need something that doesn't distract away from the text. The examples that you provided didn't have that problem.

Also the picture you used of yourself makes you a bit too serious. You need to look like you are enjoying the work that you are doing. I don't know what it's like being a voice over actor, but I do know that the atmosphere tends to be more relaxed than the typical business setting. (I'm taking this from behind-the-scenes footage from various animated series I've seen.)

Out of all the examples you provided, the best looking is the Brady Hales website. It's clean and straight to the point. Just looking at the background picture of himself tells me a lot about him before I even clicked on his voice samples. Look at his posture and clothes, what does that tell you about him? If you want something to go on, try to emulate that websites design. (Not too much though.) Remember, you want something to grab someones attention in a positive way within the first few seconds they entered the website. On the opposite end, the Steve Blum website is kinda crappy. Love his work but that was pretty bad coloring and a boring looking webpage.

Hopefully, this information was somewhat useful and good luck with the future design!

[XPRTNovice]

I don't know what it's like being a voice over actor

It's actually mostly like this:

Thanks for the feedback!

[BaconProcurement]

It's actually mostly like this:

Thanks for the feedback!

A Spartan fighting Smaug? Seems legit.

You're welcome.

[Skrypnyk]

pm ed

[XPRTNovice]

thanks, will look and get back to you

[Meteo Xavier]

Ultimately, I stand to lose the cost of the website with a chance of solidifying my brand as a VO artist, so it's a calculated risk on my part. At the minimum, I gain a little bit of fall-in-line-ism that helps me resonate with established professionals in the industry.

I don't think that's the mindset you should be having. A quality website similar to the ones you're looking at now could cost you in the realm of $1,200 - $???? if you go with established professionals (pretty much the only people who even vaguely guarantee to get the job done), and that's a mighty chunk of change just to say "well, at least my website looks like I'm one of the big names out there".

I'm not just doing my consummate nay-saying either, I've been working at a website design and marketing firm since 2003. I don't pretend to know much about the indie voice-over industry right now, but for my experience in websites, I know for a fact that an expensive looking website won't drive people in. Some of our clients are hugely popular moneymakers in the area with websites that are broken and they refuse to pay to fix it or are satisfied with it as is. Money comes in anyway. I could even go as far as saying the quality look of a website almost has no correlation with how much business it brings in based on my day-to-day experience there. You need to be looking at a website that resonates with established professionals when you yourself are currently resonating with established professionals.

If you are, then I'd say you're justified to pay that, but what it sounds like is that you're using your website as the vehicle to get you several rungs up the ladder. This mostly does not work. You need a website that REFLECTS your position in the industry, not one that tries to put you there.

You'd seriously do better just revamping it on your own and spending some of the money you had set aside for web design work towards maybe advertising around in similar circles where you get work from.

[XPRTNovice]

You need to be looking at a website that resonates with established professionals when you yourself are currently resonating with established professionals.

If you are, then I'd say you're justified to pay that, but what it sounds like is that you're using your website as the vehicle to get you several rungs up the ladder. This mostly does not work. You need a website that REFLECTS your position in the industry, not one that tries to put you there.

I think I am there. I have some big names under my belt (Red Bull, GE, Lenovo, etc) so thought it was time to start acting like voiceover artist that pulls in the clients I'm pulling. I'm definitely doing as much work as the guys I posted (with the exception of maybe Blum, whose page is, yes, shit). So, yeah, that's why I'm taking a marketing turn and trying to put brand on that level to catch up with my career, if that makes any sense. I'm trying not to be a pretentious prig in saying that I'm doing well enough, but I think I'm doing well enough.

Don't get me wrong, your insight is awesome and I totally appreciate the years of marketing/web experience you're taking the time to write and want to hear more if you have more advice to give. So I'm not just telling you to stop poo-pooing things and stroke my ego.

Edited March 25, 2014 by XPRTNovice

[Meteo Xavier]

Don't get me wrong, your insight is awesome and I totally appreciate the years of marketing/web experience you're taking the time to write and want to hear more if you have more advice to give.

On what? If you're there and can justify it, go ahead and justify it. I think that's the first I'd gotten an idea how far your voiceover career is actually going.

Additionally, and not something I'm pleased to admit, if I went further, I'd technically have to start charging for further consultation (since that's essentially what I'm doing here and one part of what I do at the firm) unless I owe you a favor. Kind of a dick move I totally agree, but in the spirit of things here... you kinda understand I think.

I thought there was more I wanted to say here but now I forgot...

[XPRTNovice]

On what? If you're there and can justify it, go ahead and justify it. I think that's the first I'd gotten an idea how far your voiceover career is actually going.

I quit my day job

Additionally, and not something I'm pleased to admit, if I went further, I'd technically have to start charging for further consultation (since that's essentially what I'm doing here and one part of what I do at the firm) unless I owe you a favor. Kind of a dick move I totally agree, but in the spirit of things here... you kinda understand I think.

I do. I'm also not above becoming a paying client if you can show me some real power and how I can harness it like an Esper.

[Anorax]

I feel like I'm watching a drug deal or something. Don't mind me, carry on.

[timaeus222]

I'll be honest, I like the JMC example most, though it's the most generic looking (it looks like something pulled from a googleable "good website design" template and modified). Still looks good though.

I didn't really like Brady Hales' design simply because it's flash, and mobile devices hate flash. In fact, iOS's have been switching over from emphasis on Flash to HTML5 for a bit over a year now.

Brad Ziffer's main body container is pretty bright against the dark background, but I liked the graphics.

Steve Blum's site is just... bad. It's old, outdated-looking, and it looks like one of those sites where the domain expired and you're led to a particular page after that. There's also a lot of animated material that would be sooooo slow on mobile.

Your current website has a background that conflicts with the text (which is plain ol' Times New Roman in the body), and the text has nothing to help it sit in page nicely (like reverb letting an instrument sit in a mix). The background image is also 4 MB, which is gigantic for mobile devices to load. ~200KB max is a good guideline. Generally the website looks OK, but optimization for fast-loading is pretty important too, IMO.

Edited March 27, 2014 by timaeus222

[MindWanderer]

One thing that Blum's site does much better than any of the others is get his branding right out there on the homepage. It's a hideous site that would have looked right in the late 90's, but for quickly getting that recognition out there, he does the best.

Collins at least does get those logos out there, but the bland blue coloring makes the eye skip over them and the blurb that actually explains what he does is just a little tl;dr.

Ziffer's and Hales's homepages only give me a vague idea of what they actually do, but Ziffer's "Voiceovers" page does a great job expressing his breadth and pedigree. His tone is juvenile, but this page gets it done like no other.

Hales's needs to die in a fire; it's pretty but useless. At least it isn't Shockwave or Silverlight.

[XPRTNovice]

I updated the example links with some better examples of good websites in the industry...the other guys were mostly people I knew to be successful.

Yes, yes! I don't like the RenManStudio website for a number of reasons, which is why I want to ditch it. I appreciate you guys supporting me in telling me how bad it is though

[timaeus222]

I like the design itself of fulginitivo, but damn, there are 8 youtube embeds on the main page. xD Again, dunno how that'll fly on mobile. Soooo many people have iPhones now, so optimizing for mobile got pretty important. The jQuery "slideshow" was great though.

Wiberg's site is simplistic, but it works well for many types of browsers and very well for mobile because of that. Now, mobile-friendly websites don't *have* to be as simplistic as this, but it does help to have the landing page to have either a) as little memory-heavy content to load as possible, or as much of the memory-heavy content loading in the background as possible and the important content loading first (since computers read and process coding from top to bottom, putting the largest linked stylesheets, scripts, etc. at the bottom is pretty effective, and putting images within CSS helps them to load before the page loads fully).

Vayron definitely has a very modern look. There are lots of little details like the dotted vertical bar on the right and the thin font that add to its sleek look, and my favorite here.

Rockbarnvoices is also great. My only gripe is that the navigation's jQuery fading is laggy on the Home and the Showreels pages, even on this Mac OSX at my university's library. Seems like a lot of content to load on those two pages.

So... my top pick of those four would definitely be Vayron, but Rockbarn is a close second.

Edited March 27, 2014 by timaeus222

[MindWanderer]

Funny, I dislike the Vayron intensely. I have no idea who they are or what they do by looking at the site. That giant, ever-changing banner is distracting, uninformative, and horrible for mobile. The blog clips below similarly have big pictures and little text, conveying minimal information. The whole site is built around the assumption that the viewer is already a Vayron fan, and from that perspective it isn't bad. But this site will win no new attention.

Fulgitini's site is the polar opposite. Bam, identity, branding, resume, reason to hire. Awesome. I agree that it's too resource-intensive and media-centric to be ideal for mobile, though.

Wiberg's site is odd. The minimal thing comes up immediately, but then it loads a ton of background resources. I'd say that was bad for mobile, but he actually has a totally different mobile site. Which, I should mention, is even more minimal, and ugly to boot. Oddly enough, I think his main website would be improved by the blurb he put on the mobile one.

Oram's site is OK. Most of her credentials are in her bio, which is very much a wall of text. Demo pages load slowly and the Twitter link covers some of the text. She's got this New York Festivals thing which she's so proud of, it's on her homepage twice, and some quotes from people I've never heard of, but it also looks like she just doesn't have as impressive a resume as the others, so this is probably about the best she can do.

[timaeus222]

Funny, I dislike the Vayron intensely. I have no idea who they are or what they do by looking at the site. That giant, ever-changing banner is distracting, uninformative, and horrible for mobile. The blog clips below similarly have big pictures and little text, conveying minimal information. The whole site is built around the assumption that the viewer is already a Vayron fan, and from that perspective it isn't bad. But this site will win no new attention.

Yes, the banner could be eliminated and the rest of the site already illustrates what the banner shows, but it's a "featured" banner. It has its purpose: to show people the latest thing as soon as they load the page, before they do anything at all. Who wants to scroll through a big web page to find something? No one, if it's gigantic.

I'm looking at it entirely objectively. Yes, it only shows demo reels and such, but the aesthetics are very well done. Even though the center banner will have laggy fades on low-performance computers, the only drawback is not its speed but its framerate, and that isn't that big a deal.

Wiberg's site is odd. The minimal thing comes up immediately, but then it loads a ton of background resources. I'd say that was bad for mobile, but he actually has a totally different mobile site. Which, I should mention, is even more minimal, and ugly to boot. Oddly enough, I think his main website would be improved by the blurb he put on the mobile one.

Minimal is fine, if not an underdone design. If it's bare, it looks weird, but ugly is just entirely subjective. V_V Either way, minimal for mobile is a good idea. The less resources and distracting elements, the better for mobile.

My point was that the resources that load in the background load when you don't see them. Thus you don't think about them, and they load while you aren't looking at them. Then when you do look at them, they're often already loaded into cache. That's the key. You don't immediately see the items that take the longest time to load, and you don't gain that impatience that web designers dread.

tl;dr: I'm focusing on efficiency, and you're focusing on marketing.

Edited March 28, 2014 by timaeus222

[MindWanderer]

tl;dr: I'm focusing on efficiency, and you're focusing on marketing.

I'm doing that specifically because you're covering the efficiency aspect effectively already. And XPRT started this whole topic because he wanted to re-market himself. The new site should hit all these points: marketing, aesthetics, and technological.

I'm not sure how you can say that aesthetics can be well done "objectively" but something being ugly is "subjective." But have you seen that mobile site? Lime green, magenta, and gray. It consists of one landing page with nothing on it but two links, one to a single paragraph bio and one to contact info. That's maybe a bit too minimal--it's basically a business card (with only his agent's phone and email).

As for loading background resources, it mostly just struck me as odd how very long the loading spinner lasted on that page. Incidentally, I opened it on my phone in desktop mode, and it's pretty bad. The whole thing is Flash, so no iOS, clicking on stuff is really hard to do, and it doesn't scale properly and you can only scroll around it if you touch the margins.

Out of curiosity, I also checked out the other sites on mobile. Oram's is technologically top notch, using CSS and HTML5 to resize and reflow most of what's on her desktop page, but it scales much too big and ends up being an example of too much content for mobile. Fulgitini's site is no different on mobile from on desktop, but everything is so BIG that it works reasonably well anyway, and it actually loaded a lot faster than I expected (much faster than Wiberg's site became functional). I guess the way Soundcloud and Youtube do streaming, resource loading isn't much of an issue. Vayron's site took so long to load, my phone offered to force close the browser! But once it did come up, it worked really well as an alternative version of the homepage, keeping all the content but doing a good gob of resizing and reflowing the columns reasonably.

[timaeus222]

I'm not sure how you can say that aesthetics can be well done "objectively" but something being ugly is "subjective." But have you seen that mobile site? Lime green, magenta, and gray. It consists of one landing page with nothing on it but two links, one to a single paragraph bio and one to contact info. That's maybe a bit too minimal--it's basically a business card (with only his agent's phone and email).

That would certainly be an example of too minimal, yes; just hadn't checked on mobile til now. However, something can be well done objectively if it captures the eyes of many or most people and the attention to detail is high, but ugly by itself is subjective. Why it's ugly is objective if the why is technical details.

And just to be clear, this isn't personal.

Edited March 28, 2014 by timaeus222

[XPRTNovice]

I rank them 1.) Rockbarn, 2.) Wiberg 3.)Vayron 4.) Fulginiti.

Vayron's site is nice...if I were a pop star. It's got the right feel for that, but not the right feel at all for a VO artist, I don't think.

Wiberg's site is nice, if very Flashy with a capital F. Simple layout, though. But I like Rockbarn's site the best because it's all up front and the content is easy to browse.

Fulginiti's site is way too busy, full of square shapes, and just...I don't like it.

Thanks you guys for the opinions on the site design. I've only gotten maybe 3 people on OCR who are saying they'd be willing to do it for me, though, so if there are any other folks actually willing to DESIGN and BUILD the site, please hit me up. I do appreciate the critique and marketing advice, though.