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25 Places to Find Awesome Stock Photos — Free and Cheap!

Whether you’re designing an artistic website or searching for images to post on your blog, sites that carry not only free but awesome stock photos may very well come in handy. Utilizing the correct set of photos for any project is key, especially if you’re designing an ad for a client, you should always put in your best effort as well as the best images you can find fit for the job. Many of the designers I’ve come across like to download most of their images from 2-3 of the largest... 

Web Monitors Uncover Top 100 Blogs and Platforms

Pingdom, a service that monitors Web sites and servers on the Internet, looked at the top 100 blogs on Technorati to find out which blogging platform is used most often. Pingdom distinguishes between blogs that are self-hosted and blogging-service hosted. The top two self-hosted platforms are Wordpress (27 percent) and Moveable Type (12 percent). The top two platforms that sit on a service are Typepad (16 percent) and Blogsmith (14 percent). When hosted and self-hosted are combined, the top two blogging... 

Roundup: Even More Sites Where You can Find Images Free and Clear

I wrote about using Flickr a while ago as a good source of images that you can use free and with few or no copyright limitations. Lately, I’ve been organizing my database of  places to find free and unrestricted images. Keep in mind that “free” often requires your giving the source credit and a link back to the image provider’s site. No, this list does not include every site in the universe. If you have some favorites, please add them as a comment and I’ll add them... 

Use Flickr to Find Images Free and Easy

Photo by Sidelong Dozens of Web sites offer royalty- and copyright-free photographs and other images. I can’t imagine having to buy stock photos and art these days, although I have many times before. I use stock.xchng and Big Stock Photo often. The photos are generic, one-size-fits-all but they get the job done with no money up or down. Lately, I’ve been using photos posted on Flickr Creative Commons. There’s an astounding variety of photos to choose from–many of them are... 

Keeping Perspective

Remember the game where you had to spot the difference in two images? Take a look at the two images below. Can you spot the difference? Compare Images If you noticed a change in the number of windows on the 3rd floor to the left of the porch area, you are right! The critical factor in making such an edit to the image is…Keeping Perspective. That can sometimes become very difficult…unless we are familiar with the Vanishing Point Filter.  Read More →

More Linking and Less Talking

Like most people, I need to practice more and preach less. For example, I need to verify that I’ve done all I can when I create internal and external links and spend more timing chasing inbound links to my sites. It’s hard for me to find the time. I have to visit my rich aunt every day at the nursing home to make sure she signs the will I drew up. She likes to talk a lot. Google reminded me not long ago that I should pay more attention to my links. The Big G ran on its Official Goggle... 

Resize It! Part 2 - Using an Action in a Batch Process

In the Part 1 of Using Photoshop Actions, we set up an Action to resize our images and add a stroke just inside the perimeter of an image. Below is an example of applying that action to an image: Image with Action Applied In this second part, we will apply this action in a batch process. The end result will be an entire folder of images are resized with a stroke just inside the perimeter of each image.  Read More →

What You Need to Know about Writing Press Releases

So far, I’ve written about the value of press releases, how to decide what is newsworthy and how to format your press releases. Now, I’m going to tell you a bit about how to write copy for your press release. I’ve also written a few times about where to put your keywords on the front (the copy your readers see) and the back (the HTML that searchbots see) of your Web pages. Keep your keywords in mind when you’re writing press releases. They’re particularly important and I’ll... 

Resize It! Part 1 - Recording an Action in Photoshop

Actions in Photoshop let us automate a process. For example, instead of spending the time to apply 5 steps to an image, then re-applying those same steps to more images, I only need to record an action one time, then at a click of a button, apply that same action to the other images. Actions can consist of only 1 step or up to as many steps as needed. Actions can also be used within a batch process – so that the action is quickly applied to numerous images. I use Photoshop Actions to create thumbnails,... 

When you try to please everyone, everyone goes home unhappy

When I do Web work–whether solo or in collaboration with a Web designer–I’m always mindful that we need to keep things simple. Sometimes keeping things simple forces us to compromise more than we would like or generalize in the interest of time and money (for us and the client’s). Ironically, when you tend to over simplify, that’s when many situations tend to get really messy. Most Web sites are tailored to a specific audience–business or consumer. How to structure... 

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