Websites, love them or hate them, you’re on one right now! Whether you are a new business, an independent freelancer, or in need of a place to showcase your portfolio, they are a useful tool in telling the world that you exist. The journey to making our website was our longest ongoing project to date, and now that it’s up and running we thought it was about time to talk about it!
Why We Need A Website
A Place to Call Home
When Stuck Up Films began in January 2022 (it looks like our anniversary is coming up!) we realised pretty quickly that we needed a presence on the internet. Instagram and YouTube pages were the first to be set up, and then other social media followed! But as this presence grew and grew, it became apparent that there was no single digital place where we could call ‘home’.
YouTube is great for video content but has limited social aspects. Instagram is great for images but is inconvenient for lengthier text posts. Facebook is great for those posts but tends to have a completely different demographic to Instagram! And this is not even to mention TikTok, LinkedIn…
By setting up a website, we could make a place where all of this content is accessible and linked to in one place, which is tailored to our unique needs.
A Portfolio of Us
As video producers, we gravitated towards YouTube as a hosting platform due to its accessibility. And even though we might get frustrated at its compression quality and features, it works for our needs. But as we made more and more content it became difficult to find ways to highlight the videos that best reflected who we were and what services we offered. Our best solution at the time was highlights of Instagram stories, but even those required clicking through each of them in sequence and then clicking a link to go to a different website or app.
By curating a selection of our content on our website, anyone interested can quickly and easily see the best of Stuck Up Films. Between music content, advertising, and short films, we make a lot! The Portfolio and Services tabs of our site can constantly evolve to meet our changing needs and output.
Discoverability
We are all very accepting of the hold that Google’s products and services have over our digital lives, to the point that so many of our daily decisions are made through them. Google Search is seen by so many as the ‘front page’ of the internet, and any business that seeks to grow must be a part of that.
If you were looking for a flower shop, you might search “florists near me” on Google. Behind the scenes, algorithms are tying together search data and Google Maps data to organise the results of local businesses into a list for you. By having a website, and working on it over time to boost your search engine optimisation (SEO), your business will slowly rise higher and higher up in these search results!
How We Made Our Website
After a few false starts, we began the development of our website on Wix! It seemed like it was best suited to our needs and was full of customisable elements. By using a website builder to make your page rather than outsourcing to a website designer, there will inevitably be disappointing roadblocks for some features which may not be possible to implement. But with some outside-of-the-box thinking, and flexibility with our ideas for formatting, we were able to reach a point where we were happy with our site.
On our Portfolio page, we were able to utilise the channels feature to organise our existing content in a way that looks like our very own streaming service! By utilising the strips feature in Wix, we could ensure that the available content on the page would adjust dynamically to whatever screen size you may be viewing it on, which helps our site to be adaptable and seamless across many different devices. We realised this was a concern when me and Tom were working on the website simultaneously, but on different devices and different web browsers, and we were equally confused as to why it looked like we had made something so visually unappealing! But the truth was that we had each designed something based solely on the screen we were working on, and as soon as we looked at the other it just did not translate fully. This is why it is important to stay inside the safety margins on Wix, as that part of the page will always be visible.
An important step in the process was also converting our website to a mobile version. The Wix strip system allowed us to mostly convert the desktop version to a mobile version automatically, but each page seemed to have its random quirks and errors that needed to be manually fixed before we launched the site. Another last-minute addition that we realised we needed to create was an icon which would appear beside the website in a browser tab! If you look up, you should hopefully see our signature red ‘sticky man’ icon in a black circle. It needed to be something simple and bold enough that it could be seen clearly when scaled down to a miniature size, and including any text would have been illegible.
An Evolving Website
If you want a website to remain popular, you need it to remain relevant! It cannot be left for months and be made increasingly out of date. This is why we are committing to updating our website frequently. With elements such as an automatically updating news feed which is sourced from our Instagram page, and making sure that our newest content and clients are visible to anyone browsing the website, we hope to keep this space interesting and fresh. Also, starting this blog has been a great motivator in providing weekly content which is exclusive to our website viewers, and as we outlined in our welcome post, we hope to continue this throughout 2024 and beyond!
- Mitchell
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