I’ve just looked through the statistics for the Name in Lights site that we launched before I went out to Texas last week.
As a reminder, it’s a site where you can see what your name will look like in huge Hollywood-style lettering and then enter a competition for why it should be made into real-world 15-foot high letters and installed on the side of a major Birmingham landmark.
On Wednesday we made the decision to remove the moderation from the site and let anyone post their names and for their name to appear instantly in the listings, without a potential 6 hour wait while it would be approved.
Visits went through the roof - over night, the statistics show that traffice tripled.
It shows that if you open up your site to user-submitted submissions without any barriers or delays you get more traffic and more people interested in what you’re doing.
Combined with that, I spent several hours internationalising the character set of the customised “glowing letters” typeface that Karl and I put together. At 6 AM I was painstakingly upgrading a standard 26-letter alphabet into a full European character set with each option of accent, cedilla as a separate letter in Flash. (Now if someone could give me a hint on how to do custom kerning with multiple character sets without having to write a huge array of every possible letter pair by hand that would be fantastic…)
Too often, designers assume that traffic to their sites are from people with names that fit into a standard Americanized view of the world. In Europe we should be doing things differently and including support for mutliple character sets.
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