C100: How did you have your website done?

Eric Coughlin

Eric Coughlin

Veteran
Did you design it yourself or hire someone to do it for you? If you hired someone how much did you pay? If you did it yourself what program did you use, how long did it take to make, and what previous web design experience did you have?

What suggestions do you have for building a videographer's web site?

Did you hire someone to do a logo as well? Who and for how much?



As was brought up in the Interview Demo Reel topic I've got a rather lame website I created with Word Press which probably took a couple days or so to make (find a theme, put photos, text, content on it, etc.). I'm planning to update it soon so am open to suggestions on the best way to go about it and am wondering what others are doing for their sites.
 
Matt Turner said:
I mostly make corporate websites but here's a few tips for video dudes:

There is a little learning curve to WordPress but honestly anyone can put up a website, the good thing is as a visual media person you will have lots of nice content to fill it up with:

- Every web host will have a "one-click" wordpress installation, install it (looks like you are already using it anyway)
- Choose a "one page" style theme from themeforest.net or a similar template site, that has a good video gallery. There are a TON of great themes. Might cost you $20
- The theme should allow you to customise it too, add the usual suspects such as about you information, contact details and your video gallery to your home page.
- Install a plugin such as Yoast SEO to improve your search rankings and fill in all the details, it's free but there are also paid options,
- Profit!

All these steps will be covered in many (MANY!) YouTube videos on how to do each step.

I wouldn't get any more carried away than a simple one page web site, and keep your video content front and centre. There's no point spending days on your web site but with a great theme you can have a good website up and running quickly.

Check out someone with a nice clean website like Philip Bloom, http://main.philipbloom.net/, nice big clean images, (mostly of him doing stuff), nice big embedded videos, for most people you wont need anything more complex than the equivalent of his "About" page.

Recommend though to spend $100+ and get a logo made, it can be very simple but used throughout your branding/cards it makes things look nice. Once again check out PB, he has a simple PB logo in red and white, and also reuses it on his videos.

Stick to a consistent look, choose a font and primary colour and stay with it, there's nothing worse than each page and your emails and cards looking totally different.

Also don't be afraid to copy other sites ideas, if you find a site you like then there's no problem making your site look similar, it's not as if your customers go around looking at billions of other sites and say "hey! you ripped off Ewe Bolls site!"

A good consistent image presented to your customers will make you look more professional, and these days doesn't need to cost a lot or take a lot of time.
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I typically hear about $250-$400 for a logo. Where would you go for a logo? I have various friends who are graphic designers and who do logos, but I don't know if they're necessarily particularly good at it.

My business cards are low quality as well at the moment. Would you just recommend something like Vista Print for business cards?
 
Now I'm not saying my logo is amazing and I may rebrand it since I am going through rebranding at the moment but I made it myself. Just got done with a small print of business cards from moo.com and while their cards are more pricey you could easily tell a difference of quality just by touching them. They where much more firm and felt more professional than 95% of the cards I get handed.

This was my business card (it also had my name, email, and phone number at the bottom but that file is on my desktop at home right now).
Logo.jpg

I personally am a strong believer of keeping it simple and not throwing anything crazy on it like images or cameras. Once I get done rebuilding my architecture portfolio I am actually going to look into wooden business cards for a few select clients, that way I stick out and dont get tossed to the side like other cards that just get mailed to potential clients
 
What these things cost and what's acceptable depends a lot on the clients you want to attract. If you're shooting low-budget commercials for local TV, you can probably get away with what a web geek would consider a pretty low-end site... but if you're going after Madison Avenue advertising work, your web site (and logo, business cards, reel, etc.) better be professionally done by a person who does it for a living.

I do a pretty stock WordPress-based site for about $1000-1500. That's a custom template and getting it installed and up and running. From there it can go up to well into the 5-figures for custom development.

Some notes about the advice given above:

First off, "one click installs" of WordPress on a generic web host are notorious for getting hacked constantly because oftentimes the "one click" part makes it damn near impossible to use WordPress's built-in update features, so your WP install gets old and is easily exploited.

Second, those $20 ThemeForest themes are largely crap. You get what you pay for.

Honestly, if you're going to try to limp along on a web host one-click install of WP and a $20 off-the-shelf theme you'd be better off just going with something like Wix or Zenfolio.

Logo: $100 is a pretty cheap logo. Most of the ones I do (and I don't do too many anymore) are in the $400-1000 range depending on a number of factors.

Business Cards: VistaPrint stuff is s*%t. Moo isn't bad, tho limited. I have a reseller account with 4Over, so that's where I print mine, but there are a number of others out there. PrintRunner is one I've used in the past with pretty great results. Get good cards on thick stock.

To sum it up, you get what you pay for with this stuff unless you're pretty good at design/development yourself. Most people aren't...

Think of it this way... if you met a professional web designer who had very little experience with video but needed a documentary made that would be one of the primary marketing tools for their business, would you recommend they rent a Canon C100 and go shoot it themselves to save some cash?
 
jbregar said:
...you get what you pay for with this stuff unless you're pretty good at design/development yourself...
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Yes, my advice was based on getting something together cheap in a DIY manner, hence outsourcing the design to a professional template builder and the logo too. The benefit of WordPress is you don't need to do any web development.

Like anything, the more you spend the better you get, and I'd also recommend getting a professional to do it.

For a lot of people a self built one from a good template will be sufficient, especially if you need only 1-3 pages.

Also I second that VistaPrint is rubbish, for a bit more $ you'll find a local printer who will do a much better job.
 
I'll throw my one out there as an example, which I based my above posts on. It's not the greatest site in the world but for this one I'm working on my own documentaries so I don't need to try to get paying customers:

http://splinter.productions/

Template cost USD$20 (approx), came with a metric ton of sample page types, maybe 50+

I customised it to use my colour which is red (that required a little web fu), all the images are shots I took myself (there's not many so far). I used the standard HTML template but they do have a WordPress version.

Logo: https://instagram.com/p/2NAjT-xh2C/
Logo cost about AU$250, but I had something else in mind when I started and had about 50 design submissions, but in the end went with a very simple one, I used 99designs.

Business Cards: https://instagram.com/p/1pHvq0Rh-O/
Cost AU$120 from a local printer, they are very clean and simple on nice card.

Total cost ~AU$400.

It's all nothing fancy but it presents a simple clean face to people I connect with.

And yes, you'd need some help to do it if you are not savvy with WordPress, but otherwise everything is in the template.
 
jbregar said:
Think of it this way... if you met a professional web designer who had very little experience with video but needed a documentary made that would be one of the primary marketing tools for their business, would you recommend they rent a Canon C100 and go shoot it themselves to save some cash?
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Depends largely on how much they think they can get back in investment on a video. If they think (and let's just say they are correct) they can only profit $500 off of having a promo video on their site, and their option is to hire me for $8,000 or rent a C100 and do it themself for $150, I'd say they should rent the C100 and do it themself.

For me personally, I don't see spending $5,000 on a website at this point as a wise investment as my website is not my primary marketing tool. I'd probably make more money off of spending that money on equipment, at least based on my clients and marketing strategy.

Horses for courses.
 
Squarespace all the way. I've developed Wordpress sites for years and Squarespace is about a 1000x more professional looking out of the box, without a hundred plugins. It defaults to responsive design, is video friendly, and just works. The basic act of making columns on a post/page is so much simpler than any other CMS WYSIWYG out there. It's $10/month.

Anyway here's my site for example, took a few hours to put together, pretty simple: www.videodads.com

Cheers,
Slavik
 
Eric, I went and look at your website as well as Ned's and frankly I don't see what's wrong with it. Sure it's not the most beautiful website, but it's simple and easy to read and go through...and everything is there. Same goes for Ned's website. I rather hire you or Ned (after looking at your website) than another guy with the coolest website...I would feel a lot more confident with you. I don't how to describe it perfectly (english is not my native language), but it's just look like you will get the job done. My 2 cents! Duane
 
I could have gone slicker but I didn't want to go over $1500 and I spent another $300 on the montages.

Also, I hate blogs! The only reason I have a stupid blog on it is because Google ranks me higher in terms of SEO, so every couple of months I'm suppose to put an "article" on it, for Google. Ugh
 
I worked as a front-end web developer for 8 years before I made the switch to doing video full-time. Sites can vary depending on what you need obviously and who is doing it.

When people ask me for a website these days (which I hate doing now haha), I buy a premium wordpress theme (themeforest usually), put their logo on it, populate it with their content, customize the look (custom CSS work), etc. Typically between $1000-$1500. For more complex designs and functionality it goes up of course.
 
I get my biz cards printed through MOO as well, I use the premium card stock and I have had nothing but compliments on the quality of my card.
 
Eric Coughlin said:
Depends largely on how much they think they can get back in investment on a video. If they think (and let's just say they are correct) they can only profit $500 off of having a promo video on their site, and their option is to hire me for $8,000 or rent a C100 and do it themself for $150, I'd say they should rent the C100 and do it themselves.
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Of course. If the additional profit was that low, I'd probably tell them not to bother because their shitty self-made video would probably HURT them more than help. That's another thing to realize... sometimes a BAD website is worse than none at all.

For me personally, I don't see spending $5,000 on a website at this point as a wise investment as my website is not my primary marketing tool. I'd probably make more money off of spending that money on equipment, at least based on my clients and marketing strategy.
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There's a long ways between "I'm doing it myself" and "$5,000." Like I said before, it entirely depends on who your clients are. If you're in Swink, Colorado and you're the only game in town you can get away with pretty much anything or maybe nothing at all. If you're in NYC and trying to get $50,000 ad campaigns you probably need to spend FAR more than $5k on your site to stand out amongst your competition.

If your primary source of new business is more work from existing clients, that also plays a part. You may not even need much of a web site.

Again, depending on your clients, you may be better off with no web site at all rather than a poor one... or the opposite could be true.

Part of hiring a professional of ANY trade is getting access to more than just their technical skills. For example, if I was working on your web site, I would have told you to 86 (or at least bury) the huge list of gear unless you're planning on running a rental house. Why? Because putting an exhaustive list of every piece of gear in nauseating detail is something amateurs do to show off their cool list of gear. Now, I'm NOT saying you're an amateur (in fact, quite the opposite)... but content strategy and how that's perceived by your audience is a bigger part of putting together an effective web site than whether you use WordPress or Wix. Another example: your footer has "Powered by WordPress | Designed by: Free WordPress Themes that Recommend Web Hosting Reviews" on it. "Free WordPress Themes" and "Web Hosting Reviews" are spammy SEO links from whoever made your base template and they will most likely hurt your SEO (if you're doing any).

Also, while WordPress may be "easy" to get started... PLEASE only use WordPress if you're committed to keeping it patched up within 24 hours or so of new releases. WordPress is a great CMS and it's incredibly powerful (I used to work for one of the top WordPress-based development shops and we did some crazy stuff with it) it has a reputation of being somewhat insecure because there are a lot of old installations running around out there getting owned.

So, like I said... if your chosen route is "set up my own WordPress site using some prefab template," just use Wix or Squarespace or Zenfolio or the like.
 
slavikb said:
Squarespace all the way. I've developed Wordpress sites for years and Squarespace is about a 1000x more professional looking out of the box, without a hundred plugins. It defaults to responsive design, is video friendly, and just works. The basic act of making columns on a post/page is so much simpler than any other CMS WYSIWYG out there. It's $10/month.

Anyway here's my site for example, took a few hours to put together, pretty simple: www.videodads.com

Cheers,
Slavik
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I second Squarespace. It's stupid easy to use and looks pretty nice IMO.
 
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jbregar said:
PLEASE only use WordPress if you're committed to keeping it patched up within 24 hours or so of new releases.
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I 2nd this: only keep installed the plugins and themes you actually use, remove everything else and check regularly (weekly!) for updates.
It only takes a minute to update though which is a bonus.
 
Slightly off topic, but what do you guys think of listing rates on there? I realize that in a way there is no "rate" cause every project is different, but you can at least give potential clients an idea of what they might be getting into (x amount for a videographer/camera/sound/lights for a full day, x per hour of editing, etc.)? If you do it, have you found it cuts down on wasted time where you have a 30 minute discussion about a project then find out someone only has $100 to spend? Do you NOT like it because people see your "high" prices and walk away, not knowing that up to a point, you may be willing to compromise/"work with them" on the rate?
 
Rates are the second dumbest thing you can have on your website. You WANT people to email and call you to get a conversation started as to how much "it will cost". Think of it as if you are fishing and the bobber starts to twitch a little.

If they're cheepos you can dump them quick. However, if they are a possibility you can sell them on your skills, gear and quality and play the negotiation game.

Having rates is like shooting yourself in the foot. A rookie move. The logic makes sense to a rookie but in reality, you want to SELL them, preferably by phone after the initial email. Besides, no buyer cares about these ala carte prices because they can't put it together in their head what the TOTAL will be, and that's all they care about is the final price.
 
I'd actually argue that those who don't have their rates on their site are the ones struggling more for work. Why? Because it's clear that they feel the need to try to talk clients into hiring them, and are willing to waste a lot of time with clients who can't afford them, as well as willing to negotiate lower rates than what they'd ideally want. If someone was truly super busy with fully paid gigs on a regular basis, then they'd publicly post their rates to save time from doing unpaid work ("unpaid work" referring to the time spent going over rates with each client and potential client individually) while also showing that they don't feel the need to negotiate lower rates and charge each client what they feel they are worth.

When I was marketing weddings (which I don't anymore) I put my wedding rates on my site; I'd say about half (or perhaps a third) of wedding companies do so. No way I want to waste my time with tons of bride who can't afford me; I was never that desperate to get weddings booked. The same goes for Steadicam operators; I'd guess around 30-50% have their rates publicly posted, including top pros in that field working on 100 million dollar budget movies.

There's also a simplicity on the client's end of not even needing to take the time to contact you to find out your rate; I know when I'm shopping for things in general that I often dismiss things without a price tag because I don't want to make an effort to contact someone to ask the price when just a click away is something similar that already has a price without taking extra time to write up an e-mail.

With that said, I don't have my day rates listed on my site, probably because I'm not busy enough to never want to take the time to deal with each client individually, and also am willing to work with different rates depending on a client's budget, my schedule, etc. But if I was more busy, I'd consider putting them up there. And I am considering doing so anyway, but haven't at this point.



jbregar said:
For example, if I was working on your web site, I would have told you to 86 (or at least bury) the huge list of gear unless you're planning on running a rental house. Why? Because putting an exhaustive list of every piece of gear in nauseating detail is something amateurs do to show off their cool list of gear.
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Again, to save a producer's time of having to e-mail you to get your gear list, I think it makes sense to have a gear list on your site. Depends on your clients, though. If you're working for video producers and video companies, they generally know equipment and would like to know what I have. For corporations, such as dealing with marketing directors, creative agencies, business owners, etc., they may just wish to know what camera you have ("Do you have a Red?") and don't care about the rest as long as your work looks good (and often don't care what camera you have). I know brides never care what gear you have.

Ned has a list of equipment on his site, and so do many other longstanding pros whose websites I see. Most Steadicam ops also list their gear on their site. Though, point taken on my list being exhaustive; I could probably take out a lot of the small items such as batteries, cables, accessories, etc., and condense it down to half or less than half the size with just the more important pieces of gear I own.
 
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I had my website built as trade for some discounted work I did for the designer. I believe it is wordpress.

I'd say first and foremost whatever you're marketing yourself as make sure it's known on the first page. Make the images bold. I take full screen screenshots from my work and place that on the home page.

Logos are overrated. They can be a cool conversation starter, but at the end of the day show the client your work. That and how you get along with them is all that matters.

I don't think it's worth it to put rates or equipment on your site, unless it's a very unique high ticket item. Depending on where you live there isn't much that can't be gotten through a rental house. And I also believe that you want to get someone on the phone asking about you're work not your camera. Though in my case I'm usually sending my website to people I've already spoken to as proof of the variety of projects I've shot.
 
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