Creating a Website

During our first session today we looked what we would be doing over the course of the Distribution Methods and Practices module. Generally, the aim of the module will be to establish a 'personal brand' and to make ourselves as attractive as possible professionally to clients and/or employers. One of the ways in which we will be doing this during the module is to establish a solid online presence and identity, partly through setting up a website on which we will host our work, present ourselves as animators and enable clients and employers to get in touch.

Creating a website to host my work is something I've been very interested since before joining the animation course and I was very keen to start looking into hosting plans and domain-names as soon as we finished todays session. 

I ended up joining 'portfolio box', as service which provides users with a range of customisable templates on which to base their website. The service is also specifically designed for hosting graphic content including video and imagery, making it very easy to update as and when projects are completed.

I had initially wanted the domain name 'www.DanHodgson.com/.co.uk', unfortunately these were unavailable. As such, I opted for 'www.theclockworkdog.com'. 'The Clockwork Dog' is an alias I have used as a username in the past when shocasing my animation, illustration and musical work online in the past. In addition to setting up a website, I also set up a Vimeo plus account. While I already have an account on YouTube onto which I upload more or less all my work, I will be reserving the Vimeo account as a more professional space, on to which I will only be uploading my best/most relevant work along with footage I intend to embed on my website.

Here is the link to my website so far: http://www.theclockworkdog.com/
Currently it is fairly underdeveloped and requires a lot more doing to it before I would consider sharing the page with potential clients/employers, however I have begun to upload examples of my animation and illustration work to the site and everything seems to be going smoothly.