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Techniques on gaining website traffic for my new animation gallery website?

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Techniques on gaining website traffic for my new animation gallery website?

Well, as some of you may know from another topic I made, I have recently created my first website, devoted to high-quality online animated films. So, my question is, does anyone know of an effective way to gain some traffic? Here is the link:

www.geocities.com/zandia89

AnimWizard's picture
The undisputed wizard of animation.

The undisputed wizard of animation.

Ideas

Hello.

You are doing it!

Try posting under the "show and tell" thread...

Also...try giving money away!

People thought my sister was fooling around with Brad Pitt, and in 4 days time she went from someplace in the millions to the 33000th ranked page on the Internet...

You know now what you must do!

hehe teasing of course...good luck though...

Well, for starters...

...drop geocities. ;)

Cheers!

Splatman :D

Yeah, lose Geocites and purchase a dot com. You can also integrate a description/keyword tag in the html of your homepage. If you have "animation" as one of your many keywords and someone enters "animation" into a search engine, it will find your site. It doens't hurt to post a link or some of your work on some of the online portfolio communites.

-cheers

Well, thanks for the suggestions, however I do have a couple questions...

1. How much does it cost to purchase a dot com? I may consider this in the future.

2. How exactly do I get my site to be listed in a search engine? I tried typing in Animation Target in Google, and nothing about my site came up.

3. Can anyone suggest a good online portfollio community that could help generate some traffic on my website?

Sorry about all the questions, I'm new at website construction. To tell you the truth, the entirety of my site was built using Geocities PageBuilder, a Java based website editing tool. So, if I was to leave Geocities, would I be correct in assuming that I would have to learn HTML? I suppose I could do that, but PageBuilder is very easy to use, not to mention I think its pretty powerful.

Thanks!

The undisputed wizard of animation.

Purchasing a dot com isn't that expensive. I bought one through Yahoo (which I don't recommend) for less than $20, plus the montly fee for the space, which I think is about $15.

The trouble with Yahoo is that even if I move my site to another provider, I'll always have to pay them for my dot com. Also, my email at my website just goes to my other email address, rather than having email hosting where the email address is the ultimate destination.

A much better option would be to look around. The dot-com itself might cost anywhere from $20 to $50, or it might be part of the set up fee. Your monthly cost depends on how much bandwidth and storage space you're getting. Nuttin' wrong with starting small.

I was looking at the prizes for the Greatest Story Never Told animation contest and one of their prizes is lifetime web storage for a site. I looked at the company providing it and liked what I saw--prices, service, bandwidth, options, etc. I'm not switching anytime soon because I have no reason to at this point in my website's tiny history and mission. But you can find lots of folks providing service out there.

Using Geocities limits your possibilities because it reduces the number of ways it can be found in a search. I get a little traffic on mine (usually about 20 hits a day on my main page) because I've submitted the site to Google and have dropped it in a few forums. Also, when I do an animation, I get it linked from a few sites and forums in my interest. That makes it turn up in some searches once in a while.

Keywords and metatags also help.

Cartoon Thunder
There's a little biker in all of us...

Okay, so how do I submit my site to Google? Is it free?

And can you reccomend any animation-enthusiast forums that I could post my website on?

Edit: Okay, I know how to submit to Google, however I have a question. How do I actually "name" my website? I have put its name on the main page, but how do I make it so that it is actually called Animation Target? When I wanted to bookmark it, its title was index, and I'm afraid its going to do the same thing with Google. PageBuilder doesn't seem to let you rename pages, so I'm not sure how to do this.

The undisputed wizard of animation.

The file name of your main page has to be index.htm or index.html.

The dot com end of things is just the name of your site that makes it easier for users to remember the site. The computer knows it by a string of numbers that are sort of an address for where it is on our now planetary bundle of wires.

So if you register for your site as (fer eggzample) www.cartoonthunder.com with Yahoo, that's just so you don't have to remember the string of numbers that your computer knows it as. When a user types that URL (Uniform Resource Locator) into their browser and (ahaa!!) finds it on the internet, it will automatically look for index.html or index.htm. If you have no index file, they're lost. So the website name and page names are two different things.

Some of my info may be a taste off, but that's the general idea.

Cartoon Thunder
There's a little biker in all of us...

All right, so how do I change the name of my website? As in, when someone bookmarks my page, it will say Animation Target, or when someone finds it on Google, it says Animation Target, rather than index. Thats the only thing I'm confused about, I've seen Geocities pages that have actual names, but mine is just called index. How do I change this?

The undisputed wizard of animation.

Basic HTML, put this in your HEAD-tag
the name which is displayed

Just have to put a strong plug in for the company that hosts my two sites:
http://www.ipowerweb.com
They are very affordable and have so many excellent features. I highly reccommend them!

Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com

I am with midPhase, but I know firsthand how good iPowerWeb can be. Second that motion.

Oh yeah...

Have a conversation with yourself about why you want a web page, what you want from it, and what purpose it serves your efforts. My own experience (which could be my own quirky thing) was that I occassionally get sidetracked into thinking I want web traffic coming to my site, and I start basing how successful I feel on how many hits I'm getting. I start putting up half effort stuff just to get new traffic to my new stuff--kinda lame.

Then I remind myself that the web site is there for me to get traffic on good stuff only. I suspect you may be more discerning than that. I also remind myself that I'm not really trying to push my website, I'm trying to get people interested in my product familiar with what I'm doing so that when I have something worth buying, they'll know who I am.

That's just my experience. I could easily be a minority on this one, but who knows.

Cartoon Thunder
There's a little biker in all of us...

True, true, but I would really like to get some traffic. 20 hits a day would suit me just fine, I just need a really good way to accomplish this. Again, are there any online animation communites besides this one that could help me gain some traffic?

The undisputed wizard of animation.

Making decisions about what

Making decisions about what site to use, what host to use, what software to use, how to use it its all a big learning curve. I recently read a blog about animation and why it works, it had some stuff on there that could help you get traffic. Read the first page and then hit other blogs to see other stuff. Hope it helps you. CLICK HERE to read it.