It has been suggested to me that one of the best ways of promoting an artist’s work is through social networking; it is simple to do, free and you can reach a worldwide audience quickly.
As my art is mainly music I have found that one of the most effective networks is reverbnation and the reverbnation app within my facebook page. This allows me to upload and share music through paid or free downloads. I can also build a group of fans worldwide of people who are into my genre of music.
I have also experimented with other networks such as twitter and myspace. Twitter is excellent for building contacts and sharing announcements which can be music related or completely random. Myspace is quieter that it used to be so the only way to reach others is to actively add friends and promote my work through messages and status updates; however I find these can go unnoticed so I don't use myspace so much anymore.
I also use youtube, vimeo and soundcloud; not really to promote my music but as a way of storing music and video which can be embedded into other websites. I particularly like souncloud as it has very smart looking music players which actually show the waveform of the track.
I believe the best way to actively promote your work as an artist is to have a presence on as many networks as possible; also to have all these channels linked into a central hub which can be my personal portfolio website.
Thursday 8 March 2012
Thursday 1 March 2012
Optimisation task
In today's interactive media seminar I was given a task of optimising an image for use on a website.
The original image is a jpeg with dimensions of 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels at 300 dpi.
The image source is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SurfaceTension.jpg
The image above has a file size of 581 KB.
I re-sized the image using Photoshop to 500 pixels by 500 pixels at 150 dpi. Here is the result:
The image above has a file size of 329 KB.
I then saved the image as a gif at 500 pixels square; here is the result:
The file size of the gif image is 149 KB. The reduction in quality is clearly visible as the gif format does not use as many colours as jpeg; this is most noticeable in the green area in the bottom right corner of the image. I believe this format would be most suitable if there is an image with a small number of colours such as a logo or button; otherwise I would use jpegs for detailed images.
The original image is a jpeg with dimensions of 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels at 300 dpi.
The image source is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SurfaceTension.jpg
The image above has a file size of 581 KB.
I re-sized the image using Photoshop to 500 pixels by 500 pixels at 150 dpi. Here is the result:
The image above has a file size of 329 KB.
I then saved the image as a gif at 500 pixels square; here is the result:
The file size of the gif image is 149 KB. The reduction in quality is clearly visible as the gif format does not use as many colours as jpeg; this is most noticeable in the green area in the bottom right corner of the image. I believe this format would be most suitable if there is an image with a small number of colours such as a logo or button; otherwise I would use jpegs for detailed images.
Contact form
I finally figured out a way to have an email contact form on my contact page instead of just a mail to link. I found a website which creates the form and runs the php for me without me having to set up my own server. I used this website to create the form: http://www.emailmeform.com/
Once I created the form from a template I copied the code into my contact page within the content area in the body. This is what the form looks like on my site:
One benefit of having this form is that people can send emails directly to my personal email account without them ever seeing my email address; this stops unwanted spam emails. My email address is hidden to the public and only exists within the server at emailmeform.com.
Once I created the form from a template I copied the code into my contact page within the content area in the body. This is what the form looks like on my site:
One benefit of having this form is that people can send emails directly to my personal email account without them ever seeing my email address; this stops unwanted spam emails. My email address is hidden to the public and only exists within the server at emailmeform.com.
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