I have such great news! I have been working very hard on updating my voiceover website, and it is finally complete! I am so excited about the new look. When I started working on updating my site I contacted a professional website design company. Those companies do great work, but I couldn’t afford to pay that much money.

Research, Research, Research

One of the reasons those professional website design companies can charge so much is because they know their stuff. So I figured I would do some research and learn what it takes to have a great voiceover website. Thankfully I have made websites before, so I wasn’t completely starting from scratch.

My research revolved mainly around what makes a voiceover website so different from other websites. The most important thing is getting your demos right up front on your page. When companies are looking for voice talents they may spend days sorting through potential hires. They don’t have any time or desire to go sifting through my website to find my demos. So I needed to get my demos as close to the top as possible.

The second thing to focus on was making sure that potential clients can get a hold of me. You will want your voiceover website to be tastefully plastered with your contact information. Your email, phone number, social addresses, and contact form should all be on your website. Don’t give a potential client an excuse to not know how to reach you. I focused on spreading my contact information throughout my website.

The next thing I focused on was my site layout. My previous site had several pages, and I noticed that most visitors to my site left after only viewing the demos page. Although I was happy my demos were being seen, I was worried that the rest of my content was being missed. It sounds lazy but people don’t like clicking. People who search on google rarely ever look at the search results past the first page, and mostly click the first five results. I wanted to make sure all of my content was in an easily accessible area.

Website Design

After I did my research, I went to work looking for the right template. After looking though almost all the WordPress templates (at least it felt like it) I finally found the right one. This template allowed me to place my demos at the very top of the page in a stylish manner.

The next thing I needed to do was combine all of my previous website’s pages into one. I focused on what was important. Demos definitely came first, but I wasn’t sure what to show next. At first I thought I would show my contact form next. But it seemed a bit tacky, as if I was pleading for them to reach out to me. I put a link to the contact form next to the demos instead.

A snippet about me went next, as well as links to my social sites. I figured that if a potential client liked my demos enough to look at my site further, they would probably want to know a little about me. After that I thought I would prove to them how good I am by showcasing my work.

If they were still interested after all of that I would show them what type of work I can do. Many people hire a voiceover artist for one type of job, not realizing they are versatile enough to handle lots of different types of voiceover work. Maybe a company visits my website in hopes to hire me to voice one of their video game characters. But while on my site they see I can do voice for IVR as well, and they end up hiring me to also record their phone prompts.

“I Feel The Need – The Need For Speed!”

As I mentioned before, people going to my site don’t have a lot of time. If they have to sit there and wait for my page to load they are more likely to move on to someone else.

To help with this I used websites like GTmetrix and Pingdom to analyze my website’s speed. I was getting a pretty low score. My main culprits were large image sizes, and preloaded audio files for my demos. Compressing my images and only loading the audio people play sped my site up a lot.

The rest of the work I did to speed my site up was a bit on the technical side, and required a lot more research; as well as the help of a few WordPress plugins. I had to reduce http requests, combine css files, and add expires headers. I was able to get my site’s load time down from around twelve second to just under two!

SEO

The last thing I worked on (and continue to do so) has been making my site more visible to people. When a company searches for voice artists I want my voiceover website to be one of the first ones they see. You can do this by having search sites crawl your webpage, adding focus keywords, and using SEO plugins. I am by no means on the first page of google yet, but I am at least started on the right track.

Voiceover Website Self-Diagnostic

Do you have a voiceover website? If so, take a look at it and see if it needs an upgrade. Share your url with people, and ask them to give you feedback. And if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, you can always contact a professional design company.