Latest News from LunarStudio

The cur­rent eco­nomic con­di­tions of the past year has put a gen­eral slow down on illustration-related busi­nesses. I think art­work in gen­eral is viewed as one of those “unnec­es­sary” things dur­ing rough eco­nomic con­di­tions, and is often the first to be cut out of a bud­get. In talk­ing with col­leagues, I’ve found that some of the larger stu­dios are barely “weath­er­ing the storm.” Many of them have had to lay off employ­ees, cut down on spend­ing, and in some cases switch their pri­mary ser­vices to fit other cat­e­gories and needs. One large archi­tec­tural ren­der­ing com­pany (which I won’t name here for sake of pri­vacy) man­aged to get by this past year by mov­ing more towards the Visual FX indus­try — get­ting involved in com­mer­cials and film. And another large firm (the biggest in the indus­try) had to cut their staff in half. And as for gen­eral illus­tra­tions and adver­tis­ing, a lot of “tra­di­tional” papers and mag­a­zines have made a larger push to the online com­mu­nity — adver­tis­ing rev­enue from their tra­di­tional sources have been cut in half.

To com­pli­cate mat­ters, there’s a con­tin­ual rise in out­sourc­ing that adds addi­tional strains to an already tight mar­ket. That’s just the way things will be unless other coun­tries economies improve or the US gov­ern­ment starts to put restric­tions on inter­na­tional trade (which prob­a­bly won’t be hap­pen­ing any time soon given all the other tasks they’re pre­oc­cu­pied with.) For now, all you can do is hope to pro­vide the best ser­vice pos­si­ble to the com­mu­nity and at rea­son­able prices — and hope that your clients and poten­tial cus­tomers rec­og­nize and real­ize that you’re try­ing the best you pos­si­bly can.

But I’m not writ­ing to com­plain about cur­rent con­di­tions and bleak fore­casts. In fact, I think that the econ­omy has turned a page this past sum­mer and things look bet­ter day by day. I know that I’ve had an increase of inquiries since the sum­mer began — so much in fact that I’ve seen a reduc­tion in job appli­ca­tions and in increase in project inquiries on a daily basis.

How­ever, where some peo­ple see gloom, I see poten­tial oppor­tu­ni­ties. Since things were slower than usual this past year, I took the time to work on var­i­ous projects and improve my own skills.

At the top of the list was to redesign my main web­site, Lunarstu­dio. I had the fol­low­ing goals in mind:

1. Improve search engine opti­miza­tion and rankings.
2. Improve the user expe­ri­ence by mak­ing less pages to nav­i­gate through.
3. Add addi­tional categories.
4. Employ some of the newer gallery light­box fea­tures such as Lightview.
5. Add an addi­tional row to my expand­ing portfolio.
6. Rela­bel all images in a more intel­li­gent manner.
7. Improve upon older images and update addi­tional content.
8. Fur­ther clean up the code behind Lunarstudio.
9. Make the option avail­able to more eas­ily view larger images.
10. Rela­bel the direc­tory struc­ture in a more cohe­sive, search engine friendly manner.

This was done over the course of late May and early June, squeezed in between some archi­tec­tural ren­der­ing projects I had done for some clients. As much as I haven’t been paid to redo my web­site, the results have been noth­ing short of amaz­ing. Traf­fic for the web­site saw an increase in over 80% and con­tin­ues to climb daily. My web­site is now listed in the top 10 of Google for over 100 search terms and key­words which dri­ves addi­tional traffic.

Now, you might ask your­self why the empha­sis on search engine opti­miza­tion? Well, I feel that a web­site is largely use­less if peo­ple can­not find it in the first place. I don’t mean any offense by say­ing this, but plenty of web­site design­ers and own­ers don’t know the first thing about search engine opti­miza­tion. They often think, that if you sim­ply make a web­site then peo­ple will be able to find it on the web. That’s not true unless you send thou­sands of emails or sta­tion­ary with your web­site stamped on it. And even then, it won’t improve your search engine rank­ing. In order to be found, you need to mar­ket your­self prop­erly online. The other alter­na­tive is to sim­ply rely on ‘word of mouth’ which can be a very slow and tedious process. How­ever, when I started out, I wanted to make sure that my web­site would be seen and get noticed with­out hav­ing to resort to hir­ing mar­ket­ing professionals.

But lets say that you did get listed in the top 10 for over 100 cat­e­gories — you still will need a port­fo­lio, a qual­ity ser­vice, and the con­tent to back your­self up. And I hope that’s where my atten­tion to revis­ing my port­fo­lio comes into play. If you have a spare moment, please head on over to my Lunarstu­dio web­site and let me know what you think. Your feed­back is always appreciated.

Time will only tell how good of a job I’ve done on the Lunarstu­dio revi­sions as well as my other ongo­ing projects. In this econ­omy, I find that there is no excuse to sit still and wait for work to come walk­ing through the door. That’s unfor­tu­nately not how the world really works unless you’re already famous. There’s plenty of things we can all do in our down-time — whether it’s look­ing for more work or try­ing to improve our own skills.