Artwork Resolution : Screen vs. Print

This has come up a couple of times in the last few weeks, so I figured I'd better post about it. If you hire Sinister Visions to create a website for you, the artwork/graphics will be created specifically for the website, for screen usage. They WILL NOT be suitable for print usage, period*.

In other words, if you only hire SVi to do a website, don't think you're getting flyer art out of the deal unless you SPECIFY that AHEAD OF TIME, and it's built into your fee. SVi is happy to create your marketing artwork at high resolution for you to use however you need, but you gotta pay for it.

If you come back after the website has been launched and ask for the artwork to use on a poster or something, please expect to pay an artwork re-creation fee, as the work will have to be remade from scratch at a print-quality resolution.

Remember, there is no magic wand, here. Photoshop is not powered by fairy dust. The graphics SVi creates are pains-takingly built, layer by layer, and can't just be "blown up" 300% without serious image degradation.

*As a frame of reference, your screen uses 72 dots (pixels) per square inch to show you an image. Something printed will be a minimum of 300 dots per inch. If you've ever seen something printed from a website, you've noticed how blurry, blotchy and blocky it looks - that's because it's screen-resolution, not meant for print. If you still don't understand the concept, take a magnifying glass and look at a magazine cover - you'll see the dots; printing screen-rez images lets people "see the dots".

Haunted Houses - Where to Spend for Ads Online?

I've had a couple of clients recently ask my opinion about where they should be spending their money online for featured listings and ads for the upcoming 2009 Halloween season. My first response is: I'm not the one to ask. Since I don't own a haunted house, your best bet is to ask other haunted house owners.

Having said that, however, I spend most of my day on the internet working for the haunted attraction industry, so I do have some thoughts and insights on the subject, which follow.

First, and most importantly: There is no one place you can buy an ad or featured listing that is guaranteed to work for you - different markets and geographic locations get different results from the same websites. National-level haunted house finder sites may work well in some areas, but will rank behind localized haunt finder sites in others. Take HauntedHouseChicago.com, for instance - do a search on Google or Yahoo! for pretty much any combination of the words "haunted" "house" and "Chicago", and HauntedHouseChicago.com will be the first link you see - national-level haunted house finder sites don't even rank in the first 10 results.

Obviously, not every market has a site like HauntedHouseChicago.com; many of them rely on the national-level sites for their internet traffic, and so should avail themselves of those sites.

Probably the best way to determine where you should focus your online advertising dollars is to do some test searches on Google.com and Yahoo.com. Put yourself in the headspace of the people that you want to find you online - you want people who (a) want to go to a local haunted house and (b) DO NOT already know about yours*. What words would they use to search for haunted houses in their (your) area? Do those searches yourself and see what websites come up in the top five results - those are probably where you should be buying your featured listings and ads.

Also, if you aren't using FREE sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networking sites to promote your haunt, you're behind the curve - but I've already covered that in a previous post.

*When it comes to featured listings and ads, the name of the game is NEW customers - don't worry about the people who already know about your haunted house. They'll find you. Focus on the people who DON'T know about your haunted house - that's where you'll maximize your ad budget.