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========== DAY 2 ============
Now that we have our hosting/domain set up and we have a healthy pile of pictures and videos, its time to start compiling them in a meaningful fashion. Unless you are super old school, you're going to need a html editor. I'm partial to Dreamweaver but it costs a couple hundred bucks (though you can download a 30-day free trial), but there are many others that will do the job (frontpage, Nvu, etc.) Now exactly how you do this is very much up to you. When I first started I had poor design skills, so my sites are very straight foward. This is how I organized my content.
Picture Pages.
-9 pictures (3x3)
-picture size maximum of 200 wide or 200 tall depending on the orientaiton of the picture (if you are good at making thumbnails, then play around with this).
-The 9 pictures are all from DIFFERENT photo sets, not all from the same one. For the typical gallery viewer this is information overload, but because we are attracting surfers looking for a very specific niche and because we only have 9 large thumbnails per page, it works well. Each thumbnail should open directly to its larger picture, don't bother opening it in another html page. (whether you want to open a new window with target="_blank" is a matter of preference.)
-I put NO BANNERS anywhere on the page. I do this for a few reasons: 1) anything that is 468x60 surfers are basically trained to ignore, and as such receive much less attention than text or buttons. 2) our site will be very organized. it will carefully funnel visitors from our front page to our sponsor page that will best attract them to sign up.
-At the bottom of the 3x3 (or whatever you decide) rows of pictures place a noticeable text link that says "View More Pictures" or "More Pictures" or something. You may want a small graphical arrow pointing to it. It should be the main link on the page and should attract the most attention. This is the link to our sponsor. Because the front page will have many many pictures on it, the surfer does not feel tricked and we get him/her to browse much more material and decide if they like the site.
-Put any necessary links in small text at the bottom below a <hr> (link 2257 info, contact, copyright, etc). make sure this doesn't detract from your main link.
One trick I've found is to change the link color when the user hovers over the link, not dramatically, just a few shades lighter. I think it encourages them to click by giving feedback, but that might be totally in my mind.
Organize your pictures into groups of 9 in this same manner and save the html pages with descriptive words to help seo like bound_redhead_pics.html or some such.
Video Pages.
Depending on how many videos you have, seperate them into groups. I find 5-6 videos on a page is good. These pages are even more enticing than the picture pages. I recommend displaying the videos in this manner:
For each video, make a centered table with 3 rows and 1 col. Set the border on the table to 0 so it's invisible. In the top cell put a screen shot of the video, I save them right from the screenshots in the content area. It should be about 200-300 pixels and roughly square. In the second cell, put a short KEYWORD RICH description with a different background color. and in the 3rd cell, put a link that says "Download (whatever.mpg)" with another different background color. Put 5 or 6 of these on a page and at the bottom put another attention grabbing link that says "View more Videos" or some such. This also goes to your sponsor. You could include a sponsor link after each video also if you would like.
Index
We're not going to worry about the index page just yet, but make sure you organize the pages you are creating to make them easy to link to from the first page. We never want our surfers to be more than 2 clicks from the sponsor.
=========== DAY 3 HOMEWORK =============================
- For tomorrow, keep track of the pages you make and try to make at least 4 picture ones and 2 video ones.
- Find a few pictures from the same series that you could write a story about (yes, those creative writing classes may come in handy after all)
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