SarahKuck.xyz – Squarespace customer – (United States)
If you are a filmmaker or multimedia creative, a personal website is a key way to showcase your work online exactly how you want to. Your website is an online hub to post your video portfolio and highlight what you have to offer. Potential clients can discover the films and video content you worked on, helping them to assess your skill level and style. In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday, we’ll introduce you to a media maker who effectively organized her own website using a FirstNameLastName.xyz domain to showcase her wide variety of film and video making experience: SarahKuck.xyz.
SarahKuck.xyz is the personal website of freelance director, editor and cameraperson Sarah Kuck. A documentarian passionate about climate change, urbanism, and community, Sarah has amassed a substantial list of multimedia content in her career, which she showcases through her digital portfolio. As she explains on her About page, Sarah makes media utilizing digital cameras, computers, pens and watercolors, and has worked on magazines, blogs, documentaries, narrative films, and commercials. Her diverse skillset is displayed in a well-organized manner for potential clients to easily navigate, which can help her to attract projects that align with her expertise.
A visually striking splash page containing a wide variety of footage from Sarah Kuck’s reel is the first thing a visitor sees when loading SarahKuck.xyz. These vignettes include imagery of human interaction, communities around the world, marvels of nature, product promotion, and even live musical performances. Visitors can gain an immediate understanding of the expansive variety of projects to be found in Sarah’s portfolio as soon as they land on her website.
When it comes to using a splash page, website design professionals often advise not to add any extra “clicks” for the user to get to your primary content. The reasoning behind this is to limit any work the user needs to do in order to get to your website’s primary purpose. However, if visualizing something is the primary purpose of your website, an engaging splash page with an extra click to “Enter” a neatly organized page can be a very effective tool.
Sarah Kuck’s Projects page leads with a “Featured Project,” followed by “Past Projects.” The “Featured Project” showcases Sarah’s most recent project with a video teaser and a descriptive caption. Below that, under “Past Projects,” clients can view more video samples of Sarah’s work. In a caption beneath each video, Sarah provides a description of the project as well as her role in each film (such as director, editor, or cameraperson), so that viewers know which part of the work she was responsible for. Sarah’s featured project is called “Tarcila: Indigenous Solutions to Climate Change From Peru,” a documentary film about Tarcila Rivera Zea, an activist who is working to help her community survive amidst the volatile effects of climate change. From the description below the embedded teaser video, visitors learn that Sarah was the director, editor, and cameraperson for this film. This organization of content gives viewers a clear glimpse of Sarah’s most recent professional work, as well as the different types of project experiences Sarah has accomplished in her career.
The Film Resume page contains further details about Sarah’s professional experience, including an embedded video reel at the top, with 28 of Sarah’s professional credits listed below. The credits are organized into four columns, labeled: Documentary, Narrative, Commercial/Web and Music Video. With Sarah’s organization by column method, potential clients can quickly see the amount of experience that she has in each category. If clients are looking for someone with experience in Commercial/Web projects, they can immediately see that Sarah has completed nine Commercial/Web projects and has held roles as an assistant camera operator, camera operator, set dresser, director of photography, and director. Each column demonstrates Sarah’s varied accomplishments in one convenient and easy-to-read location.
With Sarah’s work cohesively displayed on SarahKuck.xyz, website visitors have the opportunity to review her resume of work as well as experience a wide sampling of her completed projects all in one place. This simplified navigation makes it easy for visitors to get a strong sense of Sarah’s abilities and help them consider her for a collaboration.
Sarah is part of the thriving .xyz community of artists, creators, and multi-talented creatives showcasing their varied skills and projects on .xyz websites. Using your .xyz domain to neatly organize your visual projects can encourage your desired audiences to experience your body of work and connect for future work. Interested collaborators are invited to complete their mission by connecting with Sarah through her Contact page. You can also connect with Sarah via Twitter or immerse yourself in more of her professional work on Vimeo.
SpiritGuideSociety.xyz – GoDaddy customer (United States)
A website is a vital part of promoting your podcast because you can expand awareness to people all around the world with the ease and simplicity of one memorable domain name. Websites provide a great value to potential audiences by allowing them to easily go online to absorb everything you make available about your podcast. As discoverability for smaller and growing podcasts is sometimes limited to word of mouth, your podcast can always benefit from additional awareness. Look to Twitch co-founder Justin Kan who is using .Quest, one of the latest additions to the XYZ family of domain names, to launch Justin.Quest as the dedicated home for his podcast, The Quest. Like Justin.Quest, your website can help make it easier to have your podcast discovered, serve as an online hub for your growing brand, and even generate revenue.
In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday, you’ll learn how the popular Los Angeles-based podcast The Spirit Guide Society serves as another example to follow for building a website to elevate and enhance your podcast: SpiritGuideSociety.xyz.
SpiritGuideSociety.xyz is the online home of The Spirit Guide Society, a podcast produced by the Seven Grand bar group of Los Angeles, CA, and hosted by their “Spirit Guide,” Pedro Shanahan. For nearly a decade, popular global spirit brands have been visiting the bar group (Seven Grand, Caña Rum Bar, Las Perlas) to teach whiskey, rum, tequila, and mezcal enthusiasts about the drinks that they love. The Spirit Guide Society relays that same level of knowledge in podcast form with new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
So how does a podcast benefit from a well-designed online presence? Here are three advantages to having a website for your podcast like SpiritGuideSociety.xyz:
A website for your podcast gives your listeners a place online to become fully immersed in your brand and can help them to share it with their friends with a shorter or more memorable link. As an online virtual hub, your podcast website can include things like the podcast’s backstory and ways to stay in touch with you, including your social media handles, embedded video promos, bonus episodes, candid photos of your hosts and guests, related press clippings, and more. Visitors can strengthen their fandom and increase their brand loyalty as they absorb all of your entertaining content, which can help convert listeners into brand evangelists. With your linked social media accounts centralized on your virtual hub, brand evangelists can easily follow the accounts and share about their favorite episodes and their love of the series. Increased social media engagement from your brand evangelists increases the promotion of your brand.
Spirit Guide Society has created a virtual hub for their intoxicating podcast on SpiritGuideSociety.xyz. Visitors can learn more about the Spirit Guide Society by checking out the video page and their blog. There is a welcoming contact page that invites visitors to send a message, with included social media links for them to follow. And, there is an entire collection of Spirit Guide Society podcast episodes with links for them to listen and share. With so much Spirit Guide Society-related content to absorb, fans can learn more about the podcast and its host Pedro, and can easily hop on social media to share their brand affinity.
Having a website for your podcast helps to make it discoverable during online searches. Many people may turn to search engines to help them find their next favorite podcast, just as they do for finding most things. With their exact-match .xyz domain and the content they’ve included on their website, SpiritGuideSociety.xyz is the top search result for “Spirit Guide Society” (as of May 9, 2021). New and current enthusiasts can more easily discover SpiritGuideSociety.xyz, which can help them gain more listeners. The SpiritGuideSociety.xyz podcast focuses on educating enthusiasts about whiskey, rum, tequila, and mezcal, and their website is rich with these keywords in their titles, headings, and body content. SpiritGuideSociety.xyz is also the top search result for “whiskey rum tequila podcast,” an example of a search one might make when hunting for a podcast like theirs (as of May 9, 2021). The content on the SpiritGuideSociety.xyz helps liquor enthusiasts discover their podcast online and can help them gain more listeners.
Another benefit of creating a website for your podcast is that it gives you a place to sell your own products and services. Creating an online shop on your website can be an opportunity to make additional revenue and strengthen a special connection with your fans. SpiritGuideSociety.xyz has an online shop that they use to sell tickets to their live and virtual liquor tastings, which are recorded and posted on their video page. These virtual tasting events include at-home tasting kits containing a flight of liquor that the host and his guests will be discussing. These events offer fans of the podcast the chance to sample the featured spirits and hear about Pedro’s expertise, just as with an in-person tasting. Spirit Guide Society promotes these events on their social media and directs their listeners to SpiritGuideSociety.xyz for purchase.
Your .xyz domain can help take your podcast to the next level. After all, it’s the place for your fans to gather when they finish the latest episode and are thirsty for more. Demonstrating these three potential advantages of a website for your podcast, SpiritGuideSociety.xyz has expanded their discoverability with keyword-rich content, monetized their podcast with an online shop, and developed a fandom-strengthening virtual hub loaded with centralized, branded content. SpiritGuideSociety.xyz is an example to follow for how you can enhance your podcast by building an effective website on your own .xyz domain.
To join the fun of the Spirit Guide Society and enjoy all of their content, connect with them on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter or head over to SpiritGuideSociety.xyz.
Rosenbloomboom.xyz – Ionos customer – (United States)
.XYZ’s reputation as a domain for forward-thinkers has inspired creatives and developers from around the globe to join the movement and brand on .xyz domains themselves. Meet a developer that has set their sights on the gaming industry, and is working toward it’s evolution. This week’s #WebsiteWednesday features the portfolio of a distinctive game designer with a hopeful vision for the future of gaming: Rosenbloomboom.xyz
Rosenbloomboom.xyz is the personal portfolio website of Silicon Valley-based game designer and programmer, Honey P. Rosenbloom. Honey works as a full-time employee for Google as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Analyst. Their position plays a major role in the company’s commitment to build programming to lead to a more diverse and inclusive Google, including Employee Resource Groups, Leadership Councils, and Diversity Councils. Honey is also co-creator of Friendship Garden, a nonprofit organization “sowing the seeds of inclusivity to cultivate a gentle, playful, and sustainable games industry that welcomes and supports people of all historically marginalized communities.”
Honey aims to foster interactions that allow players to have fun while being vulnerable, connect with others, and explore themselves. Most importantly, they hope to use games to tell stories from the personal experience of living at an intersection of marginalized identities. Honey creates games as tools to inspire new perspectives from those who play them, as explained on their portfolio website.
Honey’s gaming projects include physical, digital, and hybrid games that include the usage of a variety of technological solutions, including Unity3D, C++, JavaScript, and Ionic. One thing the designs have in common is the intent to positively impact the players, whether it be socially, cognitively, or educationally.
Trash Traders is an example of an educational game that intends to positively impact players. Honey developed Trash Traders while studying at the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center. The game was designed for Apple’s iPad platform and helped introduce elementary school students to sustainability, recycling, and pollution dangers. Players in the game team up on iPads and each iPad serves as a different recycling center. The teams must quickly sort the trash that comes in, otherwise it goes to the landfill and increases pollution.
Honey designs games for adults as well. Butterfly Fields is a large-scale social game that Honey initially designed for a birthday party. Butterfly Fields encourages players to meet and mingle in social situations – utilizing secret challenges, fun icebreakers, and personal questions to encourage players to be vulnerable and develop new friendships. Honey added the ability for players to join and leave at any time without penalty, providing late-comers and those who may need to excuse themselves early some leniency, enhancing an infectious party game where no one is left out and everyone can be a social butterfly.
Honey also enjoys some competition theirself and has presented various unique projects at a handful of game design conferences over the years, including Serious Play and Connected Learning Summit. They have won prizes at competitions such as the Student Game Design Competition at 2017 CHI PLAY and the 2016 Whiskey Rebellion Festival.
Rosenbloomboom.xyz is a website set up to capture many layers of Honey P. Rosenbloom. Honey shares gaming projects and career highlights alongside their mission of changing the landscape of gaming. We are proud to have forward-thinkers like Honey defining the .xyz community. Just as .xyz is reshaping the future of the internet, Honey is working to reshape the future of the gaming industry. It’s a great fit.
See more of Honey’s work by following along on Instagram and LinkedIn, or checking out Rosenbloomboom.xyz.
MADC.xyz – Open Provider customer – (Spain)
In any well-established industry, it is the forward thinkers who will incite change, create growth, and foster evolution in the field. Growth and evolution can help ensure the endurance of your brand. Longevity results from offering services that continually satisfy customer demand, and it is even more impactful when those services also improve society as a whole. This week’s #WebsiteWednesday features an architecture and urban design firm that puts sustainability and innovation above all else: MADC.xyz
MADC.xyz is the online home of Miguel Ángel Díaz Camacho (MADC) & Partners, an international architecture firm established in Madrid, Spain. With over twenty years of experience in both public and private buildings, MADC.xyz is cognizant of the need to view each project through a lens of sustainability. According to their website, they believe that decreased impact to natural resources equals longevity and allows for the coexistence of the biosphere and urban development. MADC.xyz claims to operate under a succinct philosophy: “Design without sustainability is no longer design.” Following this belief, their view of architecture becomes a balancing act in considering people, public space, neighborhood, and the city, as well as the climate, geography, and the environment.
The firm states that they operate under the idea that “Designing is caring for the world. No excuses.” This idea was initiated by founder Miguel Ángel, a lecturer, researcher, writer, and architecture critic with a Ph.D. in Architectural Design. He also sits as Chairman of the Architecture and Sustainability Association (ASA). This care for the world extends to the firm’s online presence. MADC.xyz’s website was designed and developed as a low carbon website by Hyper Studio, a digital creative studio in Spain. According to a post on MADC.xyz, the Internet uses three times more energy than the world’s wind and solar power sources are able to provide. The manufacturing and maintenance of renewable power plants also requires energy. This implies that if data traffic keeps growing, so will the use of fossil fuels.
To design MADC.xyz with the intent of low environmental impact, they employed three energy-reducing efforts. First, they chose ProfesionalHosting, a hosting company whose policy is focused on green energy at all levels. ProfesionalHosting’s Green Hosting page states that “Our offices in Almería [have] self-produced electricity by means of solar panels and we carefully choose out Data Centers ensuring their energy comes from renewable sources.”
Visuals are an important part of MADC’s work, but they also take up quite a bit of bandwidth, and the website would not be the same without them. To solve this, they apply an image compression technique called “dithering,” allowing them to make images ten times less resource-intensive, yet still be displayed quite large. Instead of using full color, high-resolution images which impact size, they converted all images to black and white. Clicking the HD button on each image enables visitors to access the full-color high-resolution version of each image, and adds a fun interactive feature.
The second energy-reducing design tactic is that MADC.xyz does not load a custom typeface. They explain that all resources, including typefaces and logos, create an additional request to the server, requiring storage space and energy use. Visitors will see the default typefaces of their browser, a sans serif and a serif font. In place of a high concept logo, MADC.xyz’s identity consists of “MADC” with the strikethrough effect in the blank spaces between the initials.
Miguel Ángel explains, “Of course I think having a short website name helps our low-carbon website footprint mission: LESS IS MORE. We use a similar approach for the logo. Instead of a designed logotype, which would require the production and distribution of custom typefaces and imagery, MADC’s new identity consists of a single typographic effect: to use the strikethrough style in the blank spaces between letters to create a chain (the chain is the symbol about how we connect things like design-environment-people-architecture-city-food-public space-water-landscape-etc), that’s why the logo is like that (–m–a-d—c-)…it’s not an image but some connections with letters, that reduce KB and MB and GB at the end.”
The third energy-reducing design tactic is use of color. Some devices may consume more energy displaying a page with a white background versus a black one. However, accessibility can be affected by one version or another, so MADC.xyz provides both options. The default display depends on the time of the day. While visiting the website during the day, viewers will see it in white with black text. This scheme is inverted at night. They’ve also placed a toggle in the upper-right corner of the screen, another interactive feature, so that every visitor can choose between these two modes.
MADC.xyz‘s commitment to the world is echoed in their design work. Potential clients can check out an assortment of sustainable designs on their projects page, like the construction of 30 rooms intended for temporary housing for underserved families of newborns admitted to the ICU at Madrid’s Hospitals. Created in partnership with the Avintia Foundation, the rooms are designed with what they call a green infrastructure, a natural system that resets temperature fluctuations, recovers and purifies rainwater, generates oxygen, and regulates humidity. Each of the 30 rooms also has its own “energetic backpack” for production of electric power using high-performance technologies and renewable sources.
With such forward-thinking designs, it’s no surprise that their News page is filled with the many awards and recognitions MADC.xyz has earned from national and international contests in architecture and urban planning. Most recently, they took first prize in a 2020 ideas competition organized by the Insurance Compensation Consortium with the aim of executing a full renovation of a 68,000 square foot office building located at Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid.
In March 2019 they won the competition for the creation of a new Public Library in Villaverde, Madrid with their “Thousand Suns Library” design. MADC.xyz designed the library in two overlapped architecture sheds, the Cultural Shed and the Social Shed, both intended as an open infrastructure with autonomous access. The design generates new public spaces that utilize natural sunlight to create both a warm space during the winter and a cool shaded area during the summer.
MADC.xyz has developed a system of operating that seems to yield longevity. They show compassion for the environment and the overall impact their output will have on the neighborhood, the city, and beyond. The firm is branded with Miguel Ángel’s initials, short and memorable, which were available in the .xyz domain ending. The distinctiveness and minimalism of the .xyz domain aligns with the firm’s very ethos. And, when said out loud, MADC.xyz has a poetic ring to it that makes it fun to say. To read more about their services and see more examples of their design work and achievements, you can visit MADC.xyz on Instagram and Twitter.
BrianTan.xyz – Namecheap customer – (Phillipines)
Your personal website is a place where you can share your education and career experiences as well as the missions that are important to you, especially if you wish to impart helpful guidance and lessons learned from your experiences. There are no limits to what you can share, in fact you can create an online hub for each subject that you’d like to share with your audience. In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday, you’ll meet an accomplished product designer, app developer, and Effective Altruism advocate who does an extraordinary job sharing the EA philosophy as well as his varied professional experiences online: BrianTan.xyz
BrianTan.xyz is the carefully curated personal website of Brian Tan, an accomplished designer currently working full time with Effective Altruism Philippines, the local chapter of the EA organization he co-founded in 2018. Considered a philosophy, a movement, and a community, Effective Altruism is a response to an obstacle that many people face when trying to figure out the most impactful way to do some good. It’s the obstacle of wanting to help, but not knowing the best way how. In some instances, money and efforts are just not as impactful as intended. Effective altruism uses evidence and reasoning to determine how to help others as much as possible. There are over 170 different chapters of EA in over 40 countries. Brian created his chapter of the global EA movement because he wanted to bring together the local community of Filipinos interested in EA.
Brian and his EA chapter are currently working to spread the philosophies of EA and tackle COVID-19 issues with their ideas. In 2020 Brian gave an introduction to Effective Altruism and its benefits in addressing the pandemic during a virtual event organized by his EA chapter. He shares this talk in an article on his blog. He explains the attributes of Effective Altruists, including the willingness to solve global problems that are big in scale, neglected, and solvable. This includes global catastrophic and existential risks, which are things that could cause humanity to go extinct, thus ending the possibility of future generations to enjoy life. And, as with all other aspects of BrianTan.xyz, he doesn’t just tell – he also shares examples of how effective altruists are doing work in these neglected problem areas.
Brian’s experiences in the tech industry show off his impressive design skill set. On his website, Brian shares many projects from school and various employment experiences in a section labeled My Portfolio. One such experience, the co-creation and launch of the Hangtime app (a platform that helps students compare schedules with friends), served him well for a future project. Two years later, he joined a startup called HeronChat to work part-time as their lead UI/UX Designer, and made significant contributions to the design of their job placement app.
Brian is a very accomplished and globally conscious member of the .xyz community. He serves as a resource to those visiting his website. He shares not only his experiences and samples of his design work, but also the valuable lessons he has learned along the way. BrianTan.xyz serves to educate and inspire, and includes many opportunities to connect with Brian to learn more. You may also visit him on Facebook and LinkedIn.
