Introduction

I'm an animation instructor and I enjoy what I do, but before animating however, my background was in graphic design and illustration. I've been a lead corporate webdesigner for a Fortune 500 company for many years, I've had the pleasure of working with IBM Usability Groups in designing various sites, and I've freelanced for a variety of companies of various sizes.

In my journeys, I've worked with many talented marketing and design groups to help companies establish web presence, nowadays we all know that it is a crucial marketing tool, and most importantly, as a designer, I've experienced the joys and pitfalls of effective design pertaining to a website. I learned how large corporations use their sites to market themselves and how they make money.

Design and marketing go hand in hand, but for many of us wanting to establish web presence, design is not an expertise and it makes a huge difference. Welcome aboard! This blog will address some of the essentials of putting together your own creative website. It will cover the elements of putting together a great first impression for a visitor to your site within the first 3 seconds, this includes, design, color, usability, maintaining your site, blogs, using the site as marketing tool to showcase your work, posting demo reels, and later on, the use of ads and twitter to generate revenue from your site.

At the college I teach at, many instructors and students who are non design majors want to put together a website. The instructors want to use it to showcase their work, keep in contact with students and to make themselves more marketable. Let's face it, education is using the online medium more and more and so the marketable teachers are the ones who have some kind of online teaching experience. Many classes are solely taught online. We teach and encourage our students to put together a website so they can market their work, shouldn't the teacher know how to do this as well? If you are a teacher who is need of some kind of webpresence, never fear, this blog will help you out.

For my students, many of them have studied animation and game design for many years. They really haven't studied design in a way that a graphic design student has. So I show them the essentials and help them make kickbutt websites that will help them land jobs that they want.

I hope you will find this information helpful. Be sure to subscribe so you are updated of new posts so let's get started. My first post will be about putting together...

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