Website Design

[Kevin McKendree]

What will be a good website design for video. I have recently made my camera purchase (Sony A1U) and I want to get my business up and running. My focus is for Corporate, Industrial, and Television since that is where most of my experience lies at. I have always been a freelance for both TV and Films (A&E Networks, Discovery Networks, CBS, ABC, and FOX) Also should I include the Cable and Network companies on my "past clients" list?

[Keith Dobie]

Hi Kevin — are you going to design the site yourself or have a web designer create it?

[Caleb Reynolds]

Yes, include your past clients. As long as you can prove them if your ever called out on them.

And are you doing the site or someone else?

[Kevin McKendree]

My partner is doing the site, he is our Graphic Artist and a Web Developer. We have a server now, we just need to design it and put it up.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

If your website is a critical part of your business model, here are a few suggestions:

1. Stick to Home + Services/Rates + Clients/Showreel + Contact Us - The simpler the better.
2. Add lots of photos and less text. Keep the layout as simple as possible. Use HTML and make sure it will look okay on any resolution monitor.
3. For video, flash is the standard. You can get better quality with MOV/H.264, etc, but many people don't have the plug-ins installed. But 98% of internet users have flash. If you use a slightly older standard, you will be well covered.
4. Have a cool preloader with something to read, if you decide to go all flash.
5. For business purposes, I would stick to white over black (backgrounds), light shades over dark, basic fonts like arial/times roman/microsoft, etc (If you have to use exotic fonts, convert them into images).
6. Collect email addresses right from the word go. But you need to dangle a carrot for most people to bite. Don't forget to follow the 'opt-in' norms.

The idea is to get the client to follow the menu path as stated in point one. Hope this helps.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Sareesh Sudhakaran

3. For video, flash is the standard. You can get better quality with MOV/H.264, etc, but many people don't have the plug-ins installed. But 98% of internet users have flash. If you use a slightly older standard, you will be well covered.

100% of iPhone/iPad/iPod users don't have Flash & never will have so you should transparently be using HTML5 for delivering video to these users just like You Tube, Vimeo etc. The Flash Player is available to most other browsers but the video file itself should be H.264 MPEG4 just like it is on You Tube, Vimeo etc.

[Kevin McKendree]

I plan on letting my partner decide on what to use right not. We might be running three busines under one the way our structure might turn out. My friend that is designing the website will be running our Graphics and Web, my other partner will be doing music and audio, and I am concentrating on video and Television. I am thinking of modeling the site for each of our divisions.

Home ==> Video/ Television Production ==> Graphic/ Web Design ==> Audio/ Music Production ==> Clients ==> Contact Us.

I want to make sure that we use complementary colors, and have lots of pictures. Each category will have it's own theme too. I want to keep it simple, but attactive at the same time. I don't plan to use flash, but I might use YouTube for the video's. I have plenty of pictures of various studio's around florida and projects that I have worked on, I believe I should be covered.

[Peter Wiley]

From what you've written, it appears that your business plan and structure is a bit fluid and that you perhaps don't have a marketing plan developed. My advice is to consider hiring a graphic/web designer with solid branding & marketing experience once you have those details set. It's worth what you'll pay.