LunarStudio Website and Gallery Updates 2010

I’d like to announce that I’ve made some major updates to the LunarStu­dio Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ings web­site recently. While the over­all lay­out of LunarStu­dio has remained the same, there are a lot of new images as well other things which changed  “under­neath the hood.” Most impor­tantly, I finally found the time to add close to 50 new images to the web­site and have applied some minor color tweaks and adjust­ments to most of the exist­ing archi­tec­tural ren­der­ings that were pre­vi­ously there. This whole process took sev­eral days to complete.

For exist­ing clients, this should come as fan­tas­tic news. I don’t think most of them real­ize what this means. I often joke that I should cre­ate their ren­der­ings for free, and charge to post their images to my web­site. Due to the high amount of traf­fic that flows through the LunarStu­dio web­site, this is free adver­tis­ing and also helps boost their own web­site rank­ings as well. In hir­ing LunarStu­dio, you’re essen­tially more than qua­dru­pling your vis­i­bil­ity to the rest of the world. I often laugh when clients hag­gle over sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars because that same expen­di­ture may come back to them a hun­dred times over.

Updat­ing LunarStu­dio has always been tricky. Since LunarStu­dio ranks highly for a cou­ple of thou­sand search terms in all three major search engines, chang­ing the slight­est word or even adding con­tent can push search rank­ings up and down dras­ti­cally that could result in lost rev­enue. Some­thing which seems fairly straight-forward such as adding a sin­gle image needs to be care­fully exam­ined prior to being uploaded, then the accom­pa­ny­ing text needs to be mas­saged in order to “try” to achieve opti­mal results. Mul­ti­ply this by sev­eral hun­dred images, and you have a big poten­tial mess on your hands — espe­cially if you screw up a sin­gle char­ac­ter. For this rea­son, I’ve forced myself to keep the over­all design and lay­out of LunarStu­dio the same over the years. I’ve avoided adding addi­tional text. As much as I am tempted to redesign the look and feel for some­thing “fresher”, I often have to remind myself that I’m play­ing with dyna­mite. Besides, as much as LunarStu­dio has been imi­tated over the years (one of the first non-Flash web­sites to be per­fectly cen­tered on-screen), I still think it holds a lot of character.

For an exam­ple of the cur­rent sites out on the Inter­net copy­ing LunarStu­dio, check out the fol­low­ing link: http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http://www.lunarstudio.com
Keep in mind, this changes every month (some­times more) but there’s always some­one out there…

I often think peo­ple take the “search engine” itself for granted. It’s often viewed as a seam­less and organic process: type in what you’re look­ing for and out pops the results. How­ever, I’ve read stud­ies on search engine usage and the aver­age per­son doesn’t look past the first 10 items that turn up on an aver­age search. That means if you don’t place within the top 10 of any search engine result, there’s a good chance that your web­site will not be seen or even noticed. From a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive, that’s an absolute dis­as­ter. If you cre­ate a web­site, you should have every inter­est in want­ing it to achieve high-rankings as that can help oth­ers as well as bring in addi­tional rev­enue. If you don’t, then you will be stuck with the tra­di­tional method of “word-of-mouth” and hav­ing to resort to other cam­paigns to drive inter­est to your work.

There are a num­ber of things which hap­pen “behind the cur­tains” of search engine results. The engines vary slightly as the major com­pa­nies have var­i­ous patents and copy­rights on their code and com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las. On top of the code dif­fer­ences, a com­pany such as Google has been known to mod­ify their search engine algo­rithm close to a thou­sand times in a sin­gle year! Each time they make these changes, your web­site can jump up and down the ranks. They often keep these meth­ods secret because they don’t want peo­ple inten­tion­ally spam­ming their search results and pro­vid­ing irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. For the sake of this arti­cle, I will not go into the topic of search engines and opti­miza­tion sim­ply because I could prob­a­bly write a whole book on the topic. It can be a fun game to play, but you have to have time as well as patience.

For those inter­ested, here is a list of items that were changed as of 10/25/10:

1. All thumb­nails (sev­eral hun­dred) were man­u­ally changed from biege to full color.
2. Thumb­nail hov­ers were all bright­ened with an over­lay of white set to 50% opac­ity. I could have used a JavaScript, but again this would prob­a­bly have an impact on rankings.
3. Canon­i­cal rules enforced ver­sus head tags. Some pages were split­ting rank by hav­ing trail­ing slashes and non-trailing slashes after their URLs. Depend­ing on what hap­pens over the course of the next week, I may keep this.
4. Close to 50 new images and 100 thumb­nails were added to var­i­ous cat­e­gories. This is most of my work over the course of the year, how­ever there are still a num­ber of items which can­not be posted per con­trac­tual oblig­a­tions, qual­ity (some­times I’m given lim­ited time and resources), and oth­ers which are still in progress.
5. The major­ity of images were slightly read­justed con­cern­ing color bal­ance, expo­sure, and saturation.
6. Key­words and titles added to all of the new image sections.
7. Copy­rights were updated.
8. Updated man­ual sitemap.
9. Updated Google and Yahoo! sitemaps.

This is on my “to-do” list:

1. I may imple­ment Max­CDN (Con­tent Deliv­ery Net­work) to help boost search engine rank­ings and also speed up the deliv­ery of images to the viewer.
2. As a result of adding a CDN, that may impact the sitemaps men­tioned above.
3. As a result of adding a CDN, that may also cre­ate a big­ger mess by turn­ing up Page 404s — file not found errors which would all have to be man­u­ally redi­rected. When you’re talk­ing sev­eral thou­sands of links, this can be a very tedious process.*
4. Add addi­tional images.

All of this being said, please let me know if you have any com­ments or ques­tions regard­ing the updated web­site. In par­tic­u­lar, I’m inter­ested in com­ments regard­ing qual­ity, speed, and usabil­ity. I’d really appre­ci­ate your feedback.

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit: http://www.lunarstudio.com

*If any­one has any tips regard­ing imple­ment­ing the CDN and avoid­ing the 404’s and redi­rects, please let me know!