Welcome - and let me explain what this is all about
September 01, 2007
Hello Everybody! Let me introduce myself. Hi! – My name is Eric Westman, and yes… this is another pixel site. I’m a California Native living right in the center of the state in the small town of Visalia. I’ve been building websites for quite a while, in fact I do it for a living… I’ve built many sites for family and friends, and have even built a few for profit. A very large project I started a while back in 2001 - http://www.caffeinelounge.com never really took off, what with MySpace pretty much soaking up everybody’s traffic, but the site is still up and running - and I'm working on a new dating feature that will blow your mind!. I am also currently working on another big project that is restaurant related – and another project involving …. Well, I can’t give you the details on that one.. super secret! – but you get the idea.. I'm always working to get some sort of online business going. So here I am with a pixel site, and a twist… What’s the twist you say? Being an artist at heart, I’ve decided to create the largest Pop Art Masterpiece inside my house for the sake of generating some buzz, and to perhaps make a little cash to help pay for a house I bought back in October 2005. Why do I need help you ask? Being the real estate tycoon that I am, I bought my house at the peak of the real estate market. Let me tell you that the house is perhaps a little overpriced as you can see, and that my mortgage well exceeds $1600.00 a month.. yikes! On a webmaster’s salary it’s not bad, but like I said, I’m an artist at heart, and I’ve decided to try and create a little artistic history. My idea is to sell pixel ads on my pixel site and at the same time print out and create a collage of advertising in my house, covering it from ceiling to floor with internet advertisements. It will be the largest living Pop Art Masterpiece in History in the spirit of the great Andy Warhol.
I have to give props to Kim of www.houseforkim.com - She's really an inspiration to all of us with her creativity and motivation, we should all take note. I "met" Kim one day when browsing though all of the various pixel sites that are out there in cyberspace. She's a woman on a mission to help pay for a house that she designed, and in the middle of moving and being thrown into the frustration of living out of boxes inbetween living spaces. At the same time, she is also looking for the "one" to share it all with, adding a dating contest to her pixel blog, of which she's had a lot of suitors contact her. I can definately see why she is so in demand!
The idea of owning a pixel site sounds a bit dreamy, what with the quick money one might make if everybody else wasn't doing it. I'm sure you've heard of the creator of the whole pixel phenomenon, Alex Tew the self proclaimed pixel hustler. If you haven't heard of him you can see how this whole thing started by visiting http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com. I seem to be a melder of ideas in that I take many ideas and mash them up into new and interesting ones. I'll be honest, none have really made me famous and most have gotten me some strange looks from my friends. I've been toying with many ideas to help pay for my house for quite some time. I've researched ways in which I could raffle the house off by selling tickets but ran into roadblocks with the legal issues of gambling, noncompliance with nonprofit corporations and the like. My first inclination at selling advertisments on the outside of the house started when I heard a radio spot about how you could get a car for free if you didn't mind having advertisments plastered all over it. The down side of course is that you must live in a city with enough exposure to see the advertisments like Los Angeles or San Francisco... and I would imagine you would need some hefty insurance to thwart everyone from running into you because they're concentrating on the small print of the advertisment while your going down the road at 90+ miles an hour. Scary! - At any rate, that day is when I decided I wanted to sell pixels for advertising on my house. At first, the idea sounded pretty good... but then I started thinking about how a printed out piece of paper might not do so well in the sweltering heat and the very wet fog we get here in the valley. Then, one day at work it all hit me, why not do the advertising inside of my house. I know what your thinking, there is absolutely no exposure inside my house for the ads to do any good, but then I thought, if I could generate enough buzz to be the shot heard around the world - it wouldn't matter if the ads could be seen inside my house... The ads will be available online anyway, and when I'm all done, I will be selling the chunks of the Pop Art Masterpiece to benefit charity. I'll also be keeping an up to date, room by room photo blog of each room as the advertisements grow and I'm inviting the press in for photos and video. Does this mean I'll have to actually keep my house clean? Yes, probably... but being the creative type, I tend to have piles of things lying around in a manner of which I do creative projects.
I invite anybody who wants to advertise to add their website link and icon to my pixel site. You'll receive an email with instructions on how to upload your Warhol style advertisment, or you can just keep it as you upload it. I would like to see the creative works of advertisers, with lots of color and various unique styles. The printed out ads will be a bit larger, with 4 pixels equaling 1 inch square. If you purchase a 10x10 pixel spot on my site, you will also get a 2.5" by 2.5" printed out glossy somewhere in the accompanying room in the actual house, of which will go down in history in the largest Pop Art piece ever devised. Maybe you'll see your work on the news! I'm hoping that I can take the masterpiece and make it mobile once it is finished to show it around the country, but as I said, I would like to donate any proceeds from the artwork to charity.
It's been about 2 weeks since I bought the domain name adsinmyhouse.com and built the site. Marketing is probably the biggest time consumer, and trying to get people to see my artistic vision. If you want to tell a friend about this site, click here to send them an email from my site!
Thanks for reading.. more to come soon!
Eric Westman
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