You’ve seen favicons; you know, those little logos that appear before the site name or URL in your browser window.  These little icons (they’re 16×16 pixels) may seem irrelevant, but they can have a tremendous impact on your website.

Consider your own navigating habits. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a handful of tabs (or more!) open in your browser at any given time. I use a Firefox add-on that shifts my tabs vertically to the left-side of my browser window. So, many times, all I see is the little favicon.

When I go to jump to a new tab, if a site is missing a custom favicon, I have no idea what the site is without clicking or mousing over the tab. It may not seem like much of an inconvenience, but it’s a major fail, in my opinion. Not to mention if you don’t have a favicon for your site, you’re missing out on a quick and easy way to add to your brand.

Here’s a simplified look at the process of creating a favicon:

1. Use an existing logo file or create a graphic from scratch using a generator
2. Reduce the file down to 16×16 pixels
3. Export as a .ICO file (favicon.ico) with your software
4. Upload to the root directory of your website

Ready to create your own? Here are some more in-depth tutorials to give you some guidance:

• Favicon Basics, Mark8t
• Tutorial: How To Create Your Own FavIcon, Essential Keystrokes
• Video: How to Create an Install Favicons, Butterscotch.com

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tweet This Post

I found this great little Wordpress plugin for my blog, called Please Link 2 Me. It encourages readers to link to your articles from their website by providing them with the html, anchor text and all.

What is anchor text?

It’s a very powerful website optimization strategy that utilizes keyword links instead of  url links to point to a page or location and are used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to.

Anchor text enhances the relevance of the target page (<– that’s your page) and the inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages in search engines. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps.

The use of this particular plugin encourages external backlinks to your website. Links coming from other URLs should use effective anchor text in order to associate keyword phrases with your  specific internal pages. Using this plugin allows you to control those external links by providing the link AND the anchor text.

Are you starting to see the value now?

The real key in making this work to your benefit is by giving your blog articles appropriate Titles using keywords. That’s another article altogether….

Here’s an extra tip for those that submit to article directories: use anchor text in your Author’s Resource Box.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tweet This Post

Photoshop and Illustrator are among my favorite image editing tools. I use them daily for a number of things, from graphic design work to the simplest tasks, like re-sizing personal photos. But not only are they quite expensive, but the learning curve is tremendous.

It’s not easy for someone with little experience with these applications to install them and start using them fully. Heck, I don’t even use them to 100% of their capability and I have years of experience!

So what do non-designers do? What can you use to modify photos or do basic image optimization when the funtionality in the software that came with your digital camera or scanner is not enough?

Two of my favorite free image editors are Paint.NET and GIMP. I have used both on my second (and third) computers at home or at other locations when I’ve had to work in a pinch. Here are some details.

Paint.NET
Paint.NET is free and has a lot of features, including:

• Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface
• Layers
• Effects such as blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing
• Adjustable brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels
• Simple tools for drawing shapes
• Unlimited history (I love this feature because it means you can undo and undo….and undo.)

I primarily use a Mac for my work and Paint.NET is only avaialble on Windows. But I have installed and used it on a PC, and it’s really easy to use…almost deceivingly easy with the amount of functionality it provides. There is virtually no learning curve here, so I vote this as a must-try for any non-designers interested in doing image editing work.

GIMP
GIMP is probably one of the most used open source image applications. It has pretty extensive functionality and mimics Photoshop in some ways. Some of the features GIMP has includes:

• Painting tools including brush, pencil, airbrush, clone, etc.
• Gradient editor and blend tool
• Unlimited number of images open at one time
• Layers and channels
• Editable text layers
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Supports all of the major file formats

There are versions available for Windows and Mac. While it does have a lot of functionality, there’s a bit of a learning curve. If you have time to play around, do some tutorials and practice, you can do almost anything that can be done with Photoshop. One major downfall to note, however, is that GIMP doesn’t support CMYK, which makes it a no-go for any print design work. But this is still a very good, advanced (and free!) image editor.

So, have you used either of these? Are you up for giving them a try?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tweet This Post

I read TONS of books and Rob will attest that I buy TONS of books too. He actually had the audacity the other day, to say that I was going to create a sinkhole in our basement with my vast collection. Humph… he just doesn’t get it.

One of my favourite and often referred to books is  by Maria Veloso. I haven’t read another book that has given me so much inspiration or guidance in creating great sales copy for the online world.

One of the best tips she offers is to find a sales page online that you think is really great and effective, and literally sit down with pen and paper and copy it word for word, five or six times. Yep, it’ll take you forever – some of those pages are LONG but you’ll soon start to feel the rhythm of the copy and understand the methods they use and it can become second nature.

This book is chock full of awesome ideas with plenty of examples to get you in tune to write your own dynamic copy that sells!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tweet This Post