Website


Creating a website was for me what I anticipated to be the most challenging part of this module. To not only create a website but also to make it look professional I thought would be difficult as I have limited knowledge of html.

To begin, I purchased my domain name www.liamfullerillustration.co.uk through www.123-reg.co.uk. The process was simple enough, however the website attempts to sell you a bunch of add-ons in the checkout process (A .uk domain, security protection, a website template) which I had to be careful to uncheck with each step of payment.

Once I had my domain name I had to decide what platform to create my website on. Among the choices I cosnidered were:
  • www.blogger.com
  • www.tumblr.com
  • www.weebly.com
  • wordpress.com
  • www.squarespace.com

I have grown comfortable with Blogger through my university experience however I wanted a more professional finish to my website so I went with a Tumblr as there is a selection of themes to achieve this and the ability to customize them further yourself. This is where I set up the account: liamfullerillustration.tumblr.com, a starting point for my website and somewhere I could later attach my domain name to.


The initial set up for a tumblr page is minimal and crude. Your page is set up with an avatar, a title and a coloured header at the top of the page. Your posts are centralised and post singular one after the other in an infinite scroll. The ability to customize this is quite simple and there are a selection of free to use existing 'themes' to use as a starting point.


I initially used a theme 'Pocket Folio' by OLLE OTA THEMES (see above) as my starting point for my website. This theme was a good foundation to build on, it was simplistic in design and visually designed to look like an online portfolio with clean white backgrounds. This theme used colours and white type however which I did not desire so that was my first thing to change. For the look of my website I wanted black and white, black type on white backgrounds (uniform to my business cards).

The page however was still not looking as professional as I had desired and this was due to all of my posts (my artwork) being displayed as an infinite scroll mass gallery on the opening page of the website. To change this I had to customize the settings further, I deleted ALL of my tumblr posts to prevent them appearing as a scrolled gallery on my webpage and instead created separate "pages" to display my artwork in.


With these pages now set up I was able to have a website that was navigable instead of all being displayed on an individual page. I created pages for "About", "Portfolio", "Sketchbook" and "Contact" as well as linking my tumblr page to my illustration Facebook page and Instagram accounts respectively. I designed a header illustration to brand my website with which I also have used on my Facebook and Instagram accounts and the end product I am quite pleased with.


My website has an navigable opening page with an illustration, website title and clear pages to click and view. I felt this looked more professional than displaying all information (contact details, info, artwork) all on a single page.


Having set up a professional looking website I now had to link it to my domain name to give it a professional URL/web address. To do this I had to enter the control panel of my 123reg account and  go into advanced domain settings where I could changed the DNS.

Linking a website through tumblr was simple enough as tumblr tells you step-by-step how to do this. You are told to access your DNS of your domain name and change the DNS ENTRY to @, TYPE to A and DESTINATION to the IP address of tumblr (66.6.44.4) and wait 48 hours.


However, this only links your tumblr to your domain name, for me this was liamfullerillustration.co.uk, which whilst sufficient as a URL for my website I wanted a more professional web address, I wanted the www. that you see on most established illustrators websites. This was the trickier bit to creating my website as neither tumblr or 123 reg provide you with a guide on how to achieve this on their websites. I called up 123 reg directly and asked how to do this and to do so you have to further add a second DNS ENTRY, this time change the entry from @ to www, TYPE to CNAME and DESTINATION to domains.tumblr.com and wait a further 48 hours. This successfully achieved changing my website URL from liamfullerillustration.co.uk to www.liamfullerillustration.co.uk.

Having set up my webpage and linked it to my domain name I was quite happy with my website the only thing remaining that I felt was unprofessional to have on my website was my contact information. My existing e-mail address and e-mail account that I check daily was: liam.fuller@tecso.net which I had been using, whilst ok for my personal life, this I didn't think gave a professional image having an e-mail address set up with a different company, particularly as my e-mail is set up with Tesco.


To amend this I went into my control panel of my 123 reg account for my domain name and I discovered you can set up e-mails to your domain name either as stand-alone accounts or forwarding accounts. Bingo. I set up the account info@liamfullerillustration.co.uk and had it linked with my existing personal e-mail account liam.fuller@tesco.net forwarding all e-mails to this address.

I have now created and own the following:


info@liamfullerillustration.co.uk

Social media platforms:

Instagram @liamfullerillustration

 Facebook - Liam Fuller Illustration