By one measure, Jacob Cass is the top graphic designer in New York City.
It’s not because he’s won a million awards or runs a big design firm. Nor does he specialize in food-truck design.
What he does possess: a Web site, justcreativedesign.com, that tops the results when you type “freelance graphic designer NYC” and its variations into Google, a feat Cass achieved through back-end fiddling, weekly blogging on design topics and intelligent site architecture.
According to a recent study by Optify, the first three organic (nonpaid) results in a Google search get 58.4 percent of clicks, with more than half of those going to the first entry. As a result, Cass never has to look for work; he claims to receive a half-million site visits a month ,and 15 substantial project leads a week.
“All of my business comes through my Web site,” says Cass, 23. “I don’t do any advertising at all.”
If creating your own Web site has been on your someday-maybe list, it may be time to move that to-do up a few spots. If you’re a self-employed or creative professional, you already know that it’s essential to attracting new clients, showcasing your latest work and telling potential customers where to find you. If your career is corporate, a Web site isn’t going to replace Ye Olde Resume, but it’s a great place to showcase what a catch you are for employers.
And as they say in infomercials and service articles in newspapers, it’s never been easier to create your own Web site. Where do you start? Here’s where.
* STEP 1: Buy your domain name
If you haven’t already done this, now’s the time – even if you sit on it for the next five or 500 years. Most nonfamous names can be had for in the ballpark of $10 a year, so why let the other José Butterworth get it first?
It doesn’t matter all that much where you buy your domain, whether from Gandi.net, Network Solutions, Hover and so on. The big daddy of registrars is Go Daddy, a company some people love to hate. The knock on Go Daddy, aside from its brash, elephant-killing CEO, is the dated user interface and a checkout process that sends you through myriad unnecessary pages.
Personally, I don’t mind breezing past those useless.ws (stands for web site, in case you didn’t know) domain-name offers, because at the top of Go Daddy’s home page is a phone number answered by helpful people. If you’re not technical, customer service makes a huge difference. (If you buy your domain from Go Daddy, do a Web search for coupon codes first. They’re always floating around.)
Registrars make their money on the services they try to tack on, including private registration, e-mail boxes and hosting, which is a decision you will have to make. A cheap hosting plan is like parking your car in a 10-story garage, whereas a deluxe package is like putting it in a private driveway. A garage (roughly $7 to $12 a month) is probably good enough unless you are Posh’s new daughter or Jacob Cass with those half-million hits. But if you go too cheap, you may find that your site loads too slowly, or not at all if your traffic spikes.
* STEP 2: Map out your content
Assuming that you’re creating a career-related site, you want it to include: a resume or CV, examples of your work if applicable, photos and videos, testimonials, links to press coverage and other supporting material.
To improve your site’s visibility, you may also want to link up your Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.
“It’s absolutely crucial that anyone building a personal Web site integrate their social destinations into their site,” says Anthony Zarro, founder and managing partner of Drive Action Digital, a digital marketing agency. “You’re creating content that lives in multiple places that link to one another, which improves your SEO [search engine optimization].”
So can putting a blog on your site. As Cass can attest, a news stream rife with target keywords can drive traffic to your site through social media channels and searches. Cass regularly blasts his articles on design topics to the 42,267 Twitter followers who know him as @justcreative.
However, depending on your industry, blogging can also backfire, notes Manhattan headhunter Stephen Viscusi, author of “Bulletproof Your Job”. Does your field value opinion leaders or worker bees?
“Blogs are good for entrepreneurs who are running small companies,” he says. “But they can also get you into trouble. People in big companies want creative people, but if you’re going to be the loudmouthed provocateur with crazy opinions, you’re going to be perceived as difficult to manage.”
In this age of social media-fueled narcissism, you may also be tempted to load your site up with cookie recipes and your P90X before-and-after photos. But remember that your site is a marketing device, not your Facebook page. If you’re an Ironman triathlete, your endurance may appeal to employers, but photos of your pug in her Halloween tutu will make you seem unserious. (Unless your business is pug tutus.)
* STEP 3: Choose a look and feel
When you’re creating your own Web site, there are myriad design approaches that run from, shall we say, prefab starter homes to custom-built manses.
Don’t be a snob; some of those mobile homes look pretty damn good, especially with a little landscaping. You can have a site in an afternoon with Google Web Sites, Go Daddy’s WebSite Tonight, Wix, Weebly, Intuit and so on.
They offer hundreds, if not thousands, of templates, along with other services for a range of fees. See a design you like? Great. Be sure to check the provider’s ratings on tech-review sites like CNET and TopTenReviews.com.
If you prize flexibility and customization over plug-and-play immediacy, consider going with a content management system like WordPress, the standardbearer of blogging platforms.
It’s free, relatively easy to use and hugely popular. You simply buy a domain and pick a hosting company. (I’ve been happy with InMotion, and others swear by Rackspace, but WordPress has its own recommended host list at wordpress.org.) Then you download the software from wordpress.org, where you can choose one of the predesigned templates, or “themes,” as they’re called.
On the neg side: It’s open source, meaning that it’s free, and so there’s no guru to call when things go pear-shaped. Instead you must rely on WP blogs or dreaded forums to get answers, or pay a developer to sort you out.
Growing in popularity is a WordPress alternative called Squarespace, which is neither free nor open source, but easier to install, and self-hosted.
* STEP 4: Remember, it’s all about you
The ideal site should marry industry standards with your personality. When writer Stephanie Dolgoff, author of “My Formerly Hot Life,” created her site, she commissioned a mock-glammy caricature to lounge across the page.
“It says ‘I’m worth it’ to present a site with a little more than straight information,” she says.
Graphic designer Daniel Afrahim’s Web site, designbydaniel.com (which runs neck and neck with Cass’s in search results), was built to resemble a portfolio, with pages you can tab through to find work examples, accolades and more.
“Any site, whether it’s a personal or brand site, should be emblematic of who you are,” says Zarro. “It should tell your story the way you want it to be told.”
* STEP 5: Promote yourself
Once your site is built and optimized, don’t be shy. Put the URL in your e-mail signature and on your social media profiles. Get your friends to “like” it on Facebook and “plus one” you on Google+. If you do blog, send your posts out over your social media channels. You might even spend $100 to peddle your wares with targeted Facebook and Google ads.
The technology may be newish, but the hustle isn’t, and you may find the digital landscape easier to navigate than you think. If not, there’s a 23-year-old graphic designer who can help.
Faye Penn is the founder of Brokelyn.com, a Web magazine about living big on small change.
A THERAPY SITE THAT DELIVERS
If you type “Brooklyn psychotherapists” into Google, you may well run across keenemurraytherapy.com, a site run by Bill Murray and Gretta Keene.
Don’t be fooled by the wordy, homespun look of their site — it’s turned out to be a career maker.
The therapist duo created the site three years ago when they moved from Garrison, NY, to Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, a community with no shortage of shrinks.
They picked a Web host, Homestead, and studied Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, a downloadable document that outlines the SEO basics. The booklet — a must-read for anyone starting a Web site — tells you how to lace your URLs, site and page titles and meta tags (the snippet of description that comes up in a Google search) with relevant search terms. (FYI, the Google Keywords Tool can help you determine which words those should be.)
Murray and Keene homed in on terms including “trauma counseling,” “couples therapy,” “grief and loss” and “Skype therapy,” and strung them up around the site like Christmas lights. Then they took the savvy step of putting a video on their home page. The clip, which cost $400 to produce and $50 a month to license, lives on Yelp and on their site as well. (You can also make your own video and host it on YouTube.) The cozy little video features the duo’s artsy charms: They therapize together, he plays the banjo, she draws and so on. The people, as they say, love it: Keene and Murray get roughly three new clients a day from the site alone.
“The Web site means everything to our practice,” says Murray. “We get the majority of our new clients directly from it.”