Maestra Web Design

Where do I start!?

You want a website. Great! Before you contact me (or another web designer!), you should assemble a professional quality promotional package: biography, repertoire list, photos, reviews, sound and video clips and whatever else you want to include on the site and have available in your press kit.

Getting Funding:
Canadian artists can apply for a Career Development Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to help finance the "development and design of promotional tools such as media kits, photographs, posters, flyers, website, as well as videos for promotional purposes only." Grant applications are due annually on October 1st. Click here for details. Please fill out my Client Form so that I can provide you with a detailed quotation to submit with your application.

Photography:
Professional photos are key to the design of a visually interesting, dynamic and unique website. If you have good quality, recent colour photos, it's much easier to design a beautiful website that complements them, using the colours, textures and styles in your photos as the inspiration for the site. Old black and white headshots, or photos that your neighbour took in the back yard, just don't read the same way as beautiful full colour, professional photos. I can hook you up with a great photographer and a photo shoot stylist if you need one.

Written Materials:
If you need help writing your biography or editing your reviews, I can connect you with a publicist who will make your accomplishments sing. It's hard to be objective when you are writing about yourself - to focus on things that make the most impact, and present them in an engaging way. So many artist bios read like grocery lists! Why not make yours stand out from the crowd?

Client Form:
Once you have your materials ready, fill out my online Client Form or download the PDF Client Form. This will give you a starting point for planning your website - think about any special requirements, preferences and ideas you may have design-wise (colours, style, fonts) and content-wise. The form allows us to summarize and figure out how many pages, and what kind of site we're looking at in terms of complexity and price point.

Send the client form to me and we can use that as the starting point for our initial discussions of your site - by phone or in person.

Pay Deposit:
I will invoice you for half the design fee before starting work on the site. Please visit the Payments page to review your payment options. We now accept credit cards and PayPal!

Send Materials:
You can email or "snail mail" your materials to me. Anything sent digitally is usually better, as it saves me time typing and scanning, so saves you money. Digital video is best submitted as a MOV (Quicktime) file, with the excerpt you want already editted. However, for an additional fee I can excerpt, edit and convert file formats from CDs and DVDs. Files larger than 10MB should be sent on CD-Rom or DVD-R rather than email to avoid file transfer problems.

Draft pages:
Once I have your materials and deposit, and we have discussed your ideas and preferences for the site, I design a draft page from which we can start tweaking. Then, once you're happy with the layout of the first page, I will complete the site and post it (hidden to the public) for your approval. The remaining balance is due upon your approval of the site, before it is posted in full and linked up to your domain.

Domain Name and Hosting Set-up
I do the setup of domain name, hosting and email address(es) with Server101, and charge that to your credit card - the annual cost of hosting is about $99US/year, and a .com domain $15US/year.