Spring Cleaning – 3 Quick Tips to Clean Up or Freshen Your Blog Design

When spring rolls around , across the nation, there usually is a mad rush to get household cleaning out of the way, you know the kind of household cleaning that gets into a little more detail like scrubbing floors, washing windows, etc. the work that goes beyond the daily household chores.  (Or maybe you don’t know, because your lucky enough to hire out this task.)

In any case, have you considered that you should be doing the same thing for your blog or website’s design? You should consider checking out your own blog usually on a quarterly basis at minimum.  The following three points should help you to get you started.

1.        Analyze Your Website or Blog Statistics

By the time spring rolls around, usually the first three months of the year have gone by and you should be taking some time to analyze your quarterly web stats .  The three month average can give you some good insight into daily traffic, average visitors per day, overall monthly visits etc., and all the data you need to develop plans for the coming year. As a matter of fact, the WordPress blogging format, usually allows you to evaluate your site’s statistics on a quarterly basis as one of its backend features.   Of course, it will depend on your website’s peak business time or objective, but having these numbers to compare can give you good information for developing plans or make adjustments to your website’s content or design for the next following months.

2.       Observe new trends in  Graphic Design

Without that much internet research, you can get a handle on what design styles or design graphics are trending or popular that you might want to incorporate into your blog or website.  No, it doesn’t mean you are going to make drastic changes in order to follow a design trend  or fad but you might want to consider new design styles  or graphics to freshen up your blog or website’s look and still maintain your particular branding or style.  Keep in mind that you draw traffic from your website’s images as well as other graphics.  Make sure that all your images are SEO optimized with pertinent keywords.

3.       Replace or Upgrade images or pics that do not generate web activity on Online Portfolios or other Social Media sites

With so many other stats to follow or consider, most blog or website owners ( especially graphic designers) don’t actively consider checking the statistics that the images on their blog or other web assets generate.  Graphic designers are often too busy upgrading other website owners blog or websites and all too often fail to consider their own.  Remember this tip  includes picture and image collections,  online portfolios and other pics and images on social media accounts.  Just a few tweaks and changes can refresh your site and boost traffic and generate more interest in your blog or website. The engagement you develop will improve how people find you and provide more sources for potential clients to review your work.

Isolating and Colorizing A Black and White Photo

 

Being that Valentine’s Day is around the corner, this is the most recent of my Photoshop CS5 tutorials.  In this video, I cover how to remove the color from an image and isolate a specific object on the photo.  I also cover the steps on how to then change the object selected and transform either for more dramatic impact.  I also added a blur technique to the background in order to emphasize the red heart in the foreground.  The transformation of the heart to look like a Necco sweetheart candy as in the photo above was not covered in the video.

Photoshop CS5: Colorizing A Black and White Image or Photograph

As a fan of NFL football, (and as this blog post is being published, we are in the playoff season), I decided to include my armchair hobby by including this project in my latest tutorial.  Obviously, the techniques you will learn in this video tutorial can be applied to any black and white image you may be interested in  colorizing.

Reminder: Prepare Your Marketing Materials for the Holidays!

Illustration by Vector Jungle

It’s that time of the year again, when suddenly you might find yourself gearing up for the upcoming Holidays with a slew of things to get done.  The first major holiday rolling around being, of course, Halloween.

Wikipedia defines Halloween, as…

“Halloween (or Hallowe’en) is an annual holiday observed on October 31, which commonly includes activities such as trick-or-treating, attending costume parties, carving jack-o’-lanterns, bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted attractions, playing pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.”

And what should these holiday celebrations mean to you as a small business owner? Only that you might want to work with your graphic designer to develop an ad campaign for any online or print collateral marketing that you might want to do in this holiday season. This way all graphic design and graphic elements are sourced and completed ahead of the holiday schedule.   Ideally, you should have this done at least one or two months before the holiday season rolls around but getting started sooner rather than later is your best bet.

Twitter Pics: Using Twitter to Post Your Images

Twitter has rolled out it’s new “post an image to Twitter” function and while it’s a great function for all it’s users, it’s especially useful for graphic designers.  Yes, I know there are already third party providers like Twitpic, Yfrog, Flickr, and others, but adding this function within the Twitter user interface just makes posting your pics and graphic design images that much easier.

What is Rich Media?

Not just a rhetorical design question anymore —rich media is another term for the word that most people are familiar with interactive “multi-media”.   And rich media development and techniques are rapidly being used and developed in order to deliver interactive banner ads and other media that enables the user to interact with the media provided whether it is a video, website or other form of advertising.  One stellar example is Youtube mentioned in Mashable’s article “Youtube Launches Skippable Ads” which recently developed the option for end users to choose what advertising they want to watch!