I helped the band re-style their MySpace profile page to match the upcoming album art (by Mike Lowery) and I created a short 30 second video promo/teaser for the new release like the ones I did for them last year. You can watch the promo below and be sure to head over to their web site to hear the great, new tunes!

MySpace Design & Promo Vid for Commerce is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development

I really hope you take the time to read the stories, browse the photographs, and watch the videos on AfricaStories.org. Please help spread the word by sharing the site with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and whatever people still using MySpace are called.

The media team has some incredibly talented writers, photographers, and videographers that have contributed content for the first 5 “story packages” we launched with. The site will continue to be updated with new stories on a regular basis (subscribe for updates!).

My contribution to the project was creating the website that delivers the content. I used Wordpress as the content-management system it runs on and made quite a few customizations using jQuery. Most people think of Wordpress as mere blogging software, but it is quite flexible. In fact, in this implementation I completely removed the blog “posts” feature and just use the “pages”.

The main jQuery plugins I used are jQuery TOOLS and ColorBox. This was my first big leap into the world of this Javascript platform and I was really impressed with its ease-of-use and the community supporting it. What I would have created with Flash in the past, I am now able to pull off with Javascript and still have great cross-browser compatibility.

Announcing AfricaStories.org! is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development

The big three points I try to remind young artists to think about when they create an online portfolio are:

1. Form vs. Function
2. Quantity vs. Quality
3. Personal vs. Professional

You can download the PDF reference sheet I gave the students and check out my notes from the lecture.

SCAD Lecture – Round 2 is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development

The project was a collaboration with my mother who gathers and edits stories written by missionaries on the field in West Africa. Entitled “The Intercessor Connection”, the monthly newsletter (it was bi-monthly for the first 2 years) focused on personal stories of prayer requests and answered prayers.

This month my parents are retiring after 25 years of missionary service to West Africa. Their retirement and the recent re-organization of the IMB which merges the West Africa region into the larger grouping of Sub-Saharan Africa are the reasons for discontinuing the newsletter. I’m sure in the next couple months a new iteration of The Intercessor will emerge for the larger region.

I’ve compiled all the issues of The Intercessor Connection into one PDF
which you can download from the gowestafrica.org website:
http://www.gowestafrica.org/pray/newsletters/intercessor-conn-archives.pdf

I’d like to thank several people for helping out on this project that resulted in over 75 issues being created.

• First, my mom for her hard work collecting and editing the stories for all those years.
• Thanks to my dad for reviewing and approving each and every issue that went out.
• A shout out to Mary Beth Meilstrup for coming up with the original design & logo of the newsletter.
• Kudos to the folks at the IMB eMedia department for creating the mail application used to send out each issue – Marty, Jason, Paul, Harry… you guys are geniuses!
• Thanks to everyone who subscribed and read each issue.
• Thanks most of all to each of the missionaries who shared their personal stories of the joys and trials of sharing the Gospel with the unreached people of West Africa.

The Intercessor Connection Retires is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development

Here also is a PDF Reference Sheet with all the websites I mentioned during the lecture.

Using a free online gallery service or paying for a premium service is a good way to put your work online, but they lack the professional feel and uniqueness of having your own website. The free blogging software WordPress, provides a way for you to build an impressive portfolio and blog that is unique to your artistic style without having to understand the complex, technical details of website development.

Why use a blog instead of a static website?

Easier to keep content current
No need to know “code”
Dozens of free options for running your blog site
Easily tap into Social Networking with automation

Downsides of Free Blogging Services

Advertisements & other misc that distracts from your art
Sub-domains (you don’t get your own unique web address – you get something like “yourname.artblogs.com”)
Limitations on design & media
Restricted amount of content

Benefits of WordPress

Easy to setup, but limitless customization options
TONS of free themes & plugins
Large community of developers keep it up-to-date
FREE – no catches, no ads, can even be obfuscated
Many hosting services provide one-click WordPress installs
Import existing blogs to move content over

How to Setup a WordPress-driven Blog & Portfolio

1. Register a domain name (aka buy one) $7-10/year
2. Get hosting. $5-$15/month
3. Install WordPress
4. Pick your theme
5. Pick your plugins
6. Start posting

Generating Traffic

• Put your domain EVERYWHERE – business cards, email signatures, everywhere
  Link, link, link to your site
• Search engines are smart now and associate links from one site to another
• Comment on other popular (and similar) art blogs and always link back to yours
• Use Social Networking sites to bring in traffic
  • Have a “Share This” button that lets users bookmark, publish, and email your web page
  • Publish updates to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace automatically
  • Submit to sites like Digg.com & Del.icio.us
  • Put images on Flickr and pull them over to your site
  • Have a “Find Me On…” section with links
• Submit to major search engines & web directories
• Use Google’s webmaster tools & sitemaps
• Integrate a mailing list and publish important updates to them via email (don’t over do it!)
• Sign-up for several free online galleries and put a upload a few of your best pieces, then include verbiage pointing the user to your website

Monitoring the Traffic on Your Site

Google Analytics
Google Alerts
Feedburner

Common Blogging/Portfolio Dilemmas

Form vs. Function
Quantity vs. Quality
Personal vs. Professional

Art Blog/Portfolio No-Nos

• Music that automatically plays
• Splash page – First impressions! Give them a reason to stay on your site and don’t scare them away
• Confusing/vague navigation
• “Under Construction” messages
• Don’t have a blog if you aren’t keeping it up-to-date
• Ads or irrelevant junk in sidebars
• Giant banners – keep it under 200px high
• Bad spelling & grammar
• Display a stats counter

Tips for Making your Site Stand Out

Customize your theme to make it your own
Brand yourself & your site with a name or logo
Quality, Quality, Quality!
Keep your site current & interesting

Better Blogging Lecture Notes is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development

Last week the Baptist Communicators Association announced its annual winners of the Wilmer C. Fields Awards and our team won several including a grand prize. These awards are given to members of the Association to recognize those who have done exemplary work for Baptist organizations in the field of communications and/or public relations.

Here’s the rundown of the awards our team won:

Design Division
2nd place ‘Specialty Item – Printed’ category: West Africa Scrapbook Kit – Jesse Lyautey and Mary Beth Meilstrup
Honorable Mention ‘Specialty Item – Giveaway’ category: West Africa Sandals – Mary Beth Meilstrup

Interactive Media Division
1st place ‘Web Sites’ category: West Africa Regional Web Site

Grand Prize
The Diane Reasoner Award for Exceptional Achievement in Interactive Communications: West Africa Regional Web Site

I’m really excited to have been a part of that team and honored that we received the awards for the web site. Now that the West Africa and Central/Eastern/Southern Africa regions are merging we will have an even bigger team with more talented individuals. I can’t wait to see what we do this year!

Also, I had never heard of Diane Reasoner whom the award is named after so I did a little Googling and found this out:

“[In May 2008], BCA members voted to name one of its grand prize awards in honor of Diane Reasoner, longtime communications specialist for the Georgia Baptist Convention who was killed in an auto accident April 1, 2007, in metro Atlanta.

“The award named in her honor is for exceptional achievement in interactive communications, an award introduced at the BCA workshop in 2002, when Reasoner was serving the organization as president.

“‘Diane embodied the BCA spirit,’ said Trennis Henderson, vice president for communications, Ouachita Baptist University, Arkansas, as he made the recommendation to name the award in Reasoner’s honor. … During her career, she won numerous BCA awards, including two awards posthumously.” *

Now I’m even more humbled! You can see her award winning work as well as other winners’ at the BCA Awards web site.

West Africa Web Site Wins BCA Awards is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development

New Homepage for JymDavisArt.com is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development

For over a year and a half, I’ve been working with my mom sending out a bi-weekly eNewsletter called the “The Intercessor Connection.” The newsletter always contains one or two stories written by or about Southern Baptist missionaries serving in West Africa. My mom is the newsletter editor and I create and launch the emails every other week.

The subscription base has grown to almost 3500 now and I thought I’d promote it a little here. You can see past issues of the newsletter on the gowestafrica.org website and you can also subscribe to start receiving it.

West Africa Missions eNewsletter is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development

Obviously, YouTube’s encoding job is not near as good as Google’s. What is so odd is that even after Google had already compressed the video, that version was better when YouTube re-compressed it again. Or maybe YouTube didn’t recompress it at all. Maybe that is the magic trick to great YouTube quality – give it videos Google already encoded.

Google Video vs. YouTube is a post from: William Haun Photography, Video, and Web Development