Site Update in the Works

It’s been 2 months since Hockey.com closed down. I’ve been doing well grabbing contracts as freelance designer – I got calls the afternoon people found out about the layoff. However, I’m becoming concerned with the type of work are starting to send my way.

After Hockey shut down, I spent all my time loading up my portfolio with my best works and I threw a slick flash site together in a couple weeks. I put all my stock into the experience, so it worked really well from the user’s end, but the SEO value was awful. I was really hoping to hear back from the leads on jobs I had at the time, but it’s looking more like I’m going to need to start carving my own path and my site’s poor SEO might become problematic.

I’ve spent the last week or so doing a web audit on Vectorthis, analyzing keywords and past search indexing and I’ve discovered most of the indexing was done after I left IMAGES in 2007. At the time my portfolio had an unpleasantly high concentration of development projects and keywords because at IMAGES I served as a web developer instead of a designer (hence my departure). Now I have the design projects to go after the services I want, but with an all flash site none of it is being indexed and I need to rethink my strategy.

The last 5 people to contact me about work have been about all dev projects, and that’s not what I do: I’m a graphic designer. I care about picking the right typeface, setting the proper kerning, getting the lighting effects just right for the most realistic experience. I don’t really care about how the site is built and whether you need jquery or mootools to get it done. I’m very fortunate and I understand a lot of front-end development (even a good chunk of back end development). When something needs to be tweaked to achieve a specific goal, I’m more than comfortable going into scripts (front end or back end) and tweaking stuff around to do what I want, but it’s a double edged sword; not many can do that so often I somehow get pinned in this full time customizer role. There’s mixed messages about what I do and I need to correct them.

My primary strategy is going to be moving away from 100% flash – it might stick around for presentational elements like slideshows or videos – but I need to get updated and accurate info indexed. I also intend to integrate the portfolio and blog into a single site, which will dramatically improve the content on my site, as well as frequency of updates/additions. I hope to do less whining about design(er)s I like or don’t like and write more useful content.

Stay tuned. It should be pretty slick when I’m done.