Website Costings

I have a domain name and website but I wanted to clarify the costings for this.

WEB SITE DOMAIN NAME
I already have a domain name for the website from an earlier project so I can use this which is braintreefilms.com. I have this registered through 1&1 internet and will need to continue to  renew this yearly though and the cost of this is £13:09 a year.

WIX ACCOUNT
Wix is a free website building tool that I have used previously to build and  create a small site for a feature documentary I produced that did a few screenings and film festival appearances. i aim to use it again for the rebuild and repurposing
However to get rid of the Wix branding and Wix suffix on the domain name (the URL was originally you do need to pay. This is to port/connect the domain name and URL braintreefilms.com to the website based on Wix. In order to do this I needed to buy the Connect Domain Package with this functionality and the charge for this is £36:72 yearly to connect my braintreefilms.com URL. This is the simplest way of connecting my site name. However if I need any other extras and additional bolt ons I will also need to pay for these. This may be mail-boxes which will be another £34:03 a year making £70:75  year for both. However I could consider buying a Wix Premium Plan at £111:74 a year which includes both of these but also gets rid of all Wix adverts and provides more storage and bandwidth. This may be something to grow into but currently it is not needed.

VIDEO STREAMING
This can obviously be done for free on Youtube and plenty of other video based online accounts. However the quality on these can be not the best and I need a very professional look to my work and the ability to have complete control over all my content and settings. These other platforms which as I mentioned not only include Youtube but also Metacafe, Hulu and Veoh. these could be used but also could other ways of getting content to users and clients such as Facebook, Vines, Twitter and Google+. However the most stable and established platform for video and film professionals online is Vimeo. This has four different packages (Basic, Plus, Pro and Business) all of them esculating in terms of control, scale and functionality. The last 2 are designed for much bigger companies and are much more costly Pro being £159:00 and Business being £479:00 and these are something that I may need in the future and can grow into but not currently. That leaves 2 options.

Vimeo Basic: 
Cost free, 500MB/week storage, 25GB year. Unlimited bandwidth & basic privacy.
Vimeo Plus: 
Cost £49:99, 5GB/week storage, 250GB year. Unlimited bandwidth & advanced privacy including private link sharing.

I really do not want to spend the £49:99 a year on the plus but some of the functionality will make protecting my work and the digital rights management of it easier. I can encrypt work on plus and then send a link and password to whoever wants to view it thus protecting my content from being downloaded for free. I can also protect all content on the domain and They both will screen the work the same but Plus also allows me greater yearly and weekly storage. The support with issues is guaranteed to be 4 hours weekdays and 24 hours at weekends and it also allows customization of the Vimeo player if needs be.

WEB SITS DESIGN AND BUILD
This will be done by myself using Wix templates as I have some graphic design experience and it will keep the costs down. I did some research into how much it would be to outsource this and the costs varied greatly but the averages being somewhere between the two prices outlined below.

The cost of a first 1-10 page website will roughly be:
Domain name and hosting - £0.99-£50
Simple design work – £400-£600
Ongoing costs - £0-£10 per month
Overall cost - £400-£770

The cost of a small business 10-20 page website will roughly be:
Domain name and hosting - £0.99-£100
Design work – £600-£1,200
Programming - £900-£2,000
Ongoing costs - £0-£30 per month
Overall cost - £1,000-£3,500

As I have the name and hosting sorted and have covered the ongoing costs already the only other costs I would incur would be the design work and programming. So by doing the work myself and using Wix I will be saving myself a conservative estimate of between £500:00 and £2500:00. Going for the middle of these it will be saving myself about £1500:00

OVERALL COSTINGS
Taking all of the above into account the cost for creating the website breaks down like this.

£13:09: Domain Name (1&1)
£36:72; Video Hosting (Wix)
£49:99: Video Hosting (Vimeo)
£1500:00: Website build and coding (Real world costs)

Therefore if I was to outsource the design and build the cost would be £1599:80 and if I do all of the design and build work myself it would be £99:80. This makes perfectly clear that I will need to build the website myself. It will take longer but I can make it incredibly bespoke to my needs and adaptable to all of my content. Also a thorough understanding of the website will make it easier for me to update and make changes.

Brain Tree Films: Social Media Marketing

SMM or social media marketing is a huge development in the media industries and encompasses using social media to promote primary but also to indirectly market yourself and your skills and talents as well as your company. However this is not marketing in the traditional sense of the word and it is often more stealth marketing through interesting content first and foremost. This then hopefully is shared online and through social media therefore promoting you as I mentioned earlier in an indirect way but promoting you none the less. There is a reason why it is called Social Media marketing and not Advertising Media Marketing the social aspect is the key. It is like spreading good fun and interesting things by word of mouth, the moment audiences are feeling that they are being sold something or persuaded about something it risks switching them off.

From all of my research online and elsewhere I extracted the following key points that were repeatedly made at all of the sources I analysed. This will become my key and checklist to creating SMM content.

Titles: Catchy, snappy & descriptive to capture the audiences attention.

Target audience: Decide who the content is for and them match the mood & tone and interests of them.

Content: Fresh, regular & interactive. Passive content is weaker than content that gets the audience to interact, create and develop. Quizzes, polls, questions, opinions of others engaged dialogue.

Viral: Give to receive. Link baiting by visiting plenty other sites and leaving content links and trails. You need to give lots of content out there and also pass others content on forming links.

Honest: Make the content fun, creative, engaging and be subtle in dropping company name.Try not to market too much!

Video Content: Upload to platforms. If you are putting video content up on facebook then upload it to facebook not through a link to youtube. Facebook and other social media sites algorithm's give preference to content on their platform and this in turn will mean they promote the content more.

Managing Social Media: This can be a huge issue so do not try to do all playforms but just the big players. facebook, youtube, vines, twitter, snapchat and instagram for starters. Rather than managing 5+ accounts apps like Hootsuite combine all of these and allow you to manage content centrally posting to all of these rather than one at a time.

Reflection: Lack of communication with Bishop Nick

I have not managed to get any contact with the proposed client "Bishop Nick" for the past 3 weeks since our telephone conversation and the passing on of the proposals for the 2 pieces of video. It is nearly 2 weeks since I gave these to them. I have sent an emails and left a phone message but to no avail. As time is pressing and I am getting more and more nervous about this, do they not want some great "free" video content? I am going to try to visit the brewery to speak to them and find out the lie of the land. However their opening hours are usually when I am at work so this is problematic. Today I have sent another email requesting for them to contact me ASAP to get together and discuss the plans.

I am still developing my branding and marketing for my company in the background and making this my focus. This will continue to be my plan B. However whilst this is great some new creative corporate video work content to populate the web-site with would still be great. I will start researching other options and potential clients to get some.

Website Analysis: Interesting Sites

Before embarking on the design of my own web site I wanted to prevent myself from simply creating a website similar to other video production companies. So I decided to spread my net further afield and look at interesting websites and to draw ideas and inspiration from them before looking at websites from companies in the same field as my own. I trawled through lots of different sites as well as ones for video production companies looking at design, style, layout, colour and functionality all of the things I researched are the fundamentals of web design. i found this gave me a good overall opinion of what I liked and what was possible before embarking on my own design.

Brain Tree Films: Website Functionality & SEO

As well as investigating and researching web site style, functionality and design I also decided that I needed to find out more about the back end of websites. Also how to make sure that my website was very easy to find in search engines and to track usage etc of it. Below are the areas that I found out that I would need to consider using and implementing into my website.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is basically making sure that my website it optimised for search engines such as Google and Safari etc and is easy to find. When searches are carried out on search engines I obviously want to be at the top of page one of search results. This is not always possible but there are ways that you can near the top of the list based on how Google's algorithms.  For instance this sees you have encoded and labelled your website pages users using and finding your page. Google rate your success through hits/views and content so the more of these you get the higher up the list you go.

• Link baiting is one of these where you go to other sites and message boards promoting your content with a click through link to your website. 
• Using keywords and tags for your website can also do this as it flags up key areas and words associated with your website and worded correctly is used by Google to find out what your site is about. For instance using the words video, film production, promo, corporate etc for my site.
• Alt text is similar to tags or keywords but is the labelling within the code of the website and works in a similar way.
• Headings within the computer code are how key elements of the website are labelled. For instance headers and titles (H1, H2 & H3 in code) can also be used to highlight content to Google.
• Anchor text is when using any of the above it is also important to anchor the text to make Google read it in the best way for Google to find it. For instance labelling every page brain tree films and then the area documentary, music video is back to front. Always lead with the content descriptor first for the search engine algorithm to fins so it would be documentary then brain tree films. 

Types of Script/Language
I am planning on building my website through Wix but I do still need to be aware of the different languages and scripts and how and why each of them can be used. They are each used for different jobs and I will outline these below.

• HTML stands for hyper text mark up language. This is the most common code used for building a web page. It does most of the layout and architecture of the page and basically what goes where.
• CSS is cascading style sheets. This is basically a styling language of coding is used for  all of the design elements and for making the website and user interface look stylistically and graphically interesting.
• Javascript is used for any interactive functions on the website such as passwords and alerts and this functionality. It is not to be mistaken with Java which is completely different.

Landing Page
This is the page that ideally you want the users to land on from their searches. Ideally I want this to be the home page as from here the users will be able to navigate the website. Using all of the tricks above will make sure this happens.

Google Analytics
This is provided by Google for free at a basic level although it does have a scaling cost depending upon the level of functionality you want. Google analytics provides lots of data and statistics on user usage of your website. this may be invaluable for finding out areas of the content on the website that are engaging the users and those that are not as it develops. This is added to your site by adding some code to the website to let this happen.

Responsive Styling
This is where CSS are responsive to the device that users are using to browse. It will responsively adapt the website to the platform that is being used. So it will not show the full site on a mobile phone for instance as it would be unusable. So what responsive styling does is adapt the website to the phone and make it much more usable. The ways of doing this and coding are such tools Bootstrap and Angular JS. This also links to the Mobile Fist Initiative which says that 60% of websites are viewed by mobiles before anywhere else so stresses the importance of  having a website that is usable and functional for mobile phones.

Brain Tree Films: Website Research and Planning

I am a user of web-sites but tend to use them as a tool for information more than anything else. I also have some experience of building web sites in a small way having created a quickly thrown together small site for publicity purposes for a documentary feature I completed that screened in a few film festivals. I aim to undertake some research to understand how to create and use my new website.

Due to this my initial aim is to go right back to basics and research all of the fundamentals of building a web-site from design  and purpose to SEO, functionality, architecture and content. What follows is my research notes and how these areas apply to my web-site.

TYPES OF WEBSITES

• Personal/Blog (like the one you are reading for personal content/projects)
• Content sharing (youtube, soundcloud etc.)
• Community/Social (twitter, facebook etc)
• Information (like a news website)
• Business brochure/catalogue (where it simply shows you what they do, like a restaurant)
• e-commerce (where you buy things such as Amazon)

From all of these types (genres if you like) as with all catagories one size does not fit all. First and foremost I want my website to be like an online business catalogue to demonstrate what all of the skills are I have to offer and show work the very best work I have created as a selling point. It will contain information but this will really be from a business or contextual perspective of the work, brief and creation process, the client (testimonies)or possibly a company ethos and details about myself and the company. It will not share content but be a platform to view my content and I aim to link and embed examples of my work through a service like Vimeo. As far as it being a community or social site it will not be these but it will have social media click throughs to twitter and facebook etc. This will be used as a news feed of what the company is up to as well as a marketing tool for creating an awareness of the company. It will not really be a blog but it may be good to have a news area of what I am developing, working on or have just finished though. It will not have an e-commerce aspect to it as although it will promote my services they will not be bought through the site. This may change in the future if I decide to sell through completed work on line.

WEBSITE LAYOUT, STYLE & CONTENT

• Style appropriate to website purpose? (mood and design appropriate?)
• Design and layout simple, busy or cluttered (consider web content and adverts)?
• Do colours / text clash?
• Make sure all images and video content are web optimised i.e. do any of them take ages to download?
• The content should be refreshed and include sticky content to engage the user.
• Leave clicks that take the users away from your site to the bottom of the page.

The following are all areas I will have to consider moving forward whilst developing the website. I want a clean, contemporary and professional looking web-site and the design must follow this. I want a simple layout without too much clutter and as little text as possible. This will include clean lines and a simple colour palette with 2-3 fonts maximum. I do not want it to look too corporate though and colour will be used to create a professional but approachable site and company. I want plenty of images and also plenty of video to populate the website and all of these to be optimized for the web. This content by it's nature especially the video elements will be sticky and engage the viewer. For the video a showreel of best work as well as short versions of work (to save users time) will be used as well as the full pieces. I will also make sure all click-throughs to other sites that will take users way from my page are at the bottom of pages so they are there but my content will have to be viewed first.

FUNCTIONALITY, NAVIGATION & INTERCTIVITY

• A simple and well labelled menu? 
• No broken (not working) or incorrect links?
• Site architecture good and flows well. No cul-de-sacs to frustrate users.
• Must have functionality across all platforms. This means the user experience must be good on all computer browsers as well as verions for tablet or phone.
• Use of any elements of sharing (content or blog), data capture, gaming?
• Use fresh content to keep users coming back?

I want a really clear menu that runs consistently through all pages. The users and potential clients may be 20 and digital natives but equally may be 50+ directors or even CEO's of companies who are not as literate online. The site needs to appeal to all and be stable and easy to navigate with nothing ever more than 2 clicks away. The architecture needs to be well thought out and really accessible. Initial ideas has navigation buttons to home, about the company, the different areas of work corporate, promotional, documentary, pop video and possibly art. I see each piece of work having it's own page with an overview of the brief, making it and client testimony about it. There will also be news feed to show what is happening or coming up and a contacts page to message the company.

I feel this research has helped to clarify the purpose and content of my website and will stand me in good stead when I embark on it's design and structure.

Developing a Brand Identity & Marketing

Due to a lack of response from Bishop Nick I m going to start to develop a plan B. The whole aim of embarking on a relationship with them was to start to create work to kick-start my own small production company. As I have mentioned in earlier posts this is and area I wish to grow and the idea of the work for them was to act as a calling card to try and attract other business.


Going back to the absolute beginnings of this project as well as creating this video content and to try and attract other clients I would obviously need to start marketing myself more in a professional way. The original aim of my professional development unit was to as well as create the video content also create a platform for it to be displayed upon. As the video element is struggling I am going to focus my energies on the web-site but alongside that develop my brand, marketing and identity.


I already have a company name and have traded under this for a couple of projects. This is Brain Tree Films which as well as being my home town in my opinion also represents the themes of wisdom and also growth. Alongside this I have a web site domain in this company name and a web-site for a feature documentary I made that could be relegated to a micro site with a complete overhaul of this to repurpose the web-site.


The aim is to focus on all of these promotional and marketing aspects and to start developing, researching and possibly creating all of the following.

• Develop my company branding and identity as well as mission statement.
• Develop long term strategy for creating work and content to promote the company.
• Create a logo and company identity.
• Create a motion graphic for the logo.
• Create a marketing strategy online. SMM, online presence etc.
• Create a marketing strategy offline. Letters, emails,

Bishop Nick: Completed Briefs, Visuals and Storyboards.

As discussed with the client I completed a brief/treatment or creative as well as rough mock up visuals and visual ideas and storyboards for the "Our story" and "Promo" video. I dropped these into the brewery but neither Libby or Nelion were there to talk to about it. They follow on from discussions that said i was heading along the right lines and that I should develop these and get back to them.I am hoping that they will get back to me ASAP so we can discuss this further.

Bishop Nick "Our Story" Mini Documentary: Cut Out Animation Techniques & Inspiration

I want to create an innovative historical documentary skinny of Bishop Nick from the perspective of the Ridley family and their long associated history with brewing from Bishop Nick through to Nelion Ridley today. This will go in their "About Us" section on the web-site and convey this long association with brewing in a funny, quirky, pacey and memorable way. One way I am considering doing this is using cut out animation techniques and the handmade quality, clash of source images and craft feel of it which I feel will work well with the company branding and image.

Below are some examples of the films I researched for ideas and inspiration. I will show these to my client to give them an idea of the mood, tone and feel I am going for.

This animation below simply entitled "Collage - Cut Out Animation" demonstrates one of the techniques I am considering applying. The techniques is a very old one and involves cut outs being animated moving around the frame. Today it is easy to recreate and be more innovative with it using Adobe After Effects and rather than simply playing around with the animation on a flat plane use the foreground and middle ground as well as the flat background. The interplay and variety of sources of image and juxtaposition of these can be really interesting.





Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame was also a pioneer of the cut-out animation technique combining fun visuals with a real sense of humour. The "Miracle of Flight" and "Monty Python Versus Animation" both below illustrate this excellently.

"To Thee Moon" is another excellent example of this technique. Again the juxtaposition of images and basic nature and "handmade quality" of bering crafted shine through. The film also has a darker feel that I may able to draw upon for elements of my idea.

Bishop Nick: Contact at last

Libby from Bishop Nick finally got back to me! Firstly they emailed me back the questionnaire filled and then we had a phone conversation to discuss the finer points of it. We had a catch up and discussed the ideas that I had for the two sections that I had been working on the "Our Story" section and the Promo/Advertorial about the company, produce, history, etc. The discussion was really positive and they liked all the directions that I was considering

The key points from the discussion were.

• Develop the animated "Our Story" idea to a brief and few visuals.
• Develop the "Promo" idea to also a brief and a storyboard/shot-list.
• We need to try and firm up dates so I have a deadline to work to.
• Better communication between myself and especially them.
• An issue may be they are very busy over the next month or so but if I develop the ideas we can look to possibly shoot late July or August.
• Money is obviously going to be an issue but if I inform them of exactly what expenses I may have they will look to find a little money for these.
• They are really excited about the idea of video content on their website and for promotions.

I am going to work on developing the ideas and get back to them within the week.