A couple of time saving Google Tools

Here are two time saving tools recently launched by Google.

Firstly if you are a blogger and use Twitter to promote your blog posts (it was one of my best uses of Twitter - Can Twitter Help My Business), Google's Feedburner now incorporates a "socialize function". This allows Feedburner to automatically tweet any new blog post directly to Twitter. It can be customized in a variety of ways including

• Post content: Title, Title and body or body only

• Inclusion of a link

• Automatic creation of hash tags

• The ability to add custom text

A nice little time saver, you can read more about it here: AdSense for Feeds: Socializing your feed with Twitter.

Secondly is the Share button built into the latest Google Toolbar, download it here.
The share button enables you to send any page you visit to a huge variety of social networks, blogging accounts, email address anything from Facebook to Yahoo Bookmarks. It provides a shortened version of the URL - particularly useful for Twitter accounts where you are limited to 140 characters.

As usual both of these tools are offered for free. What tools are you using to save time?

Click for more tips and tricks

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

The anatomy of a repeating pattern: Free vector download

Looking to design a unique repeating pattern? It is easier than you think.

Start with a simple shape like an oval

Duplicate and rotate to form a flower shape

Duplicate horizontally

then vertically


Voila!

Printed out these are a great coloring project for kids.
Download repeating pattern here

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

Free Vector Graphic: Winter Theme Pattern

In honor of the "great snowfall" we are due over the next 36 hours, here in St Louis, here is a free vector graphic of a repeating pattern with a winter theme. The great land of Twitter is busy speculating inches. Snow anyone?



2010 © St Louis Web Designer

Holiday Greetings from the St Louis Web Designer.

I like to produce a digital holiday card for my customers each year and this year have spiced it up with a custom video produced using xtranormal. "If you can type you can make movies". Its a great application and easy use. You can select from a whole bundle of characters, give them different accents set the background, camera angles, make them move and apply ambient sounds... and all for FREE. What's not to love about that.

So sit back and enjoy my little message from this fabulous green robot ( he has an English accent of course). I think I may have to make him my mascot!

Free Vector Graphics: Circular Pattern Set

Enjoy this set of free vector graphics from your St Louis Web Designer



Download Here

2009 © St Louis Web Designer

ipod earbuds fall out of my ears. Do yours?

Music can often be a great inspiration to me when I am in designing and my ipod is always on my desk. However, hands up if your ipod earbuds fall out of your ears? Mine do, the standard ipod earbuds were swiftly replaced with an in-ear pair but I still have problems with "fall out".

A St Louis company, Yurtopia™ has come up with a fabulous novel product to end this misery: the yurbuds™. They convert the standard ipod earbuds to custom fitting earbuds which are not only more comfortable but they DO NOT FALL OUT!

A pair costs just $19.99

Visit

www.yurbuds.com

and get free shipping with this code: QF5SG






2009 © St Louis Web Designer

Free Vector Patterns

I have always been drawn to patterns (no pun intended!). As a kid I loved geometry coloring sheets and my first job in design was the creation of anti counterfeit patterns for currency. More about that another day!

Here are a couple of simple vector patterns for you to enjoy.

Download them for free

2009 © St Louis Web Designer

Generate revenue from your websites: AdSense

Looking for an easy way to make some additional revenue from your web site? Try Google AdSense.

A small snippet of code placed on your web site will generate Goggle ads earning you revenue based on a cost per click or cost per impression basis. You can fine tune the look and feel of the ads to compliment your site, have control over the size and shape and even block competitors ads from appearing on your pages. It is completely FREE .

Is Adsense right for your website? Here are a few things to consider

• What levels of traffic does your site experience? Sites with a high volume of traffic will bring in more revenue.


• Does your site rank highly for any popular keywords or phrases? Our site on counterfeit detection ranks very highly for the key phrase "counterfeit detection". Due to the popularity of this phrase there are plenty of Google advertisers bidding on this phrase for the display of their adverts and hence no shortage of ads to display on the site.


• Are you comfortable having advertisements on your site? Despite the high traffic and favorable key phrase ranking Indigo Image gets, we are not comfortable having Google Ads featured on our site. They could offer our visitors a reason to leave and explore the services offered by another web design/ graphics arts company. It is possible to block competitors sites but blocking all advertisers bidding on a generic key phrase, e.g. in our case something like logo design, is not feasible.


• Do you have a suitable area on your site to display ads? To get the most out of the ads they need to be placed in a prominent place. Does the design of your site accommodate this?
  

I have a couple of personal site with pretty high traffic and excellent rankings on the search engines that are a perfect platform to display Google ads. The ads were configured to compliment their color schemes and feature prominently at the top of each site without being too intrusive. They provide a steady stream of revenue.

Free Vector Art Brush set for Adobe Illustrator.

During this recent project, I made good use of one of my favorite tools in Adobe Illustrator - custom brushes.

In under ten minutes I have produced this complicated graphic, simply by designing a set of custom brushes and applying them to a circle.


Here are the brushes I generated:-



They are yours for free. Download the zipped file Here

To install

1. unzip the file
2. Copy the file to your Illustrator > Presets > Brushes folder
3. Restart illustrator.
4. Illustrator>window>brush libraries>indigo_image_1

The brushes will now appear in your brush palette.

Enjoy!

St Louis web designer tip of the day: Give your blog a boost

Blogs are a great way to promote your services, improve your search engine ranking and provide a great way to interact with your readers.

Here are some quick tips to give your blog a boost and grow your readership

1. Write it regualry - at least twice a week.
2. Comment on other blogs- in the comments box there is often an opportunity to include your own website or blog URL.
3. Title your blog posts with keywords you are targeting.
4. Submit your blog to a blog directory such as blogcatalog
5. Give your readers different options to subscribe to your content. e.g. sign up through a reader - try Goggle Reader or sign up to receive via email.
6. Start a Twitter account and use it to promote new blog posts.
7. Use a free pinging service such as Pingoat

St Louis web designers tip of the day!

Twitter experiment

Are you using Twitter yet?

I have had a Twitter account for quite some time now but only really started using it recently. Twittering is like micro blogging; you have 140 characters to have your say. It is quick, easy and free.

As with any social networking tool there is a time commitment, albeit relatively small for Twitter, so I have set myself a number of goals to see if it is really worth the effort.

To follow me on Twitter click here

Gift Tags Freebie: seasonal graphic design fun

Here is a set of custom gift tags designed using Adobe Illustrator which you can download for FREE print them out on your desktop printer. A St Louis Web Designer freebie

How to open .RAR files

A client recently sent me a .RAR file which I was unable to open. A little internet research revealed that .RAR files are compressed archives similar to .Zip files. RAR has the benefit of creating an archived file which is 8 to 30% smaller than Zip archives.

Like .zip files, .rar files require a piece of software to extract or uncompress the data. There are lots of free solutions out there but this one from 7-zip.org worked very well for me.

Feedback from i google theme designs

I took a look recently at how popular the themes I have created for i Google are and got a pleasant suprise.

Perfect Petals has had rave reviews and proves to be the most popular:

Perfectly Brilliant Elizabeth Deal - Jul 18, 2008 - Thank you for such a beautious theme. I love the brilliant color on a black background. I truely love it!

Breathtaking Anonymous - Sep 10, 2008 - I love coming in everyday and opening my google site to this beautifully displayed flowers--it starts the day off right.

Color Punch also has some fabulous comments:

Brava Brava Dolce2001@aol.com - Aug 2, 2008 - Thank you, Zoe Feast, for creating this truly unique, beautifully colored and visually pleasing accent for an iGoogle homepage. It's not just the colors that I like, it's the design that accents them. Well done!

Outstanding! - Anonymous - Jul 5, 2008 - Very impressive..and easily worth a 5 star rating. Hope to see more of your stuff! Well done.

Thanks you to everyone who has taken the time to rate and comment on the themes.

Printing coupon: Save $75 off your next printing project

Here is a great offer from printingforless.com

Visit their web site or call 800.930.6040 and by mention referal code RP1I8DF78  and you save $75 off your first order.

A St Louis Web Designer freebie of the day

Download Googles New Browser: Chrome

Here is the link to download Google new browser Chrome. It is free

I have just downloaded and installed and already  am impressed with the clean sleek design which is so typical of Google. There is no fluff just a simple box where you can type search phrases or enter the url directly ...same box dual function. As you type into the box the browser makes suggestions which I can already see will expediate the whole browsing process. The lack of fluff at the top of the browser increases the amount of screen avaiable for page viewing.

Pages appear to render faster too.

So far so good. 

I am going to do a bit of testing over the next few days to evaluate browser compatibility issues. Is the browser rending web sites as they were designed and coded to be displayed?

Google Launches a new Web Browser: Chrome

I am a huge fan of Google and was delighted today to see they are launching a completely new web broswer, built from the ground up.
They have produced a comic which describes in layman terms the features of their new system. The browser is due for launch today and I will be keeping an eye on the official Google blog for that magic download link.

The new browser includes:-

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it.
  
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar
  
• An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
  
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed
  
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
  
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information
  

How much does it cost for a web site?

"How much does it cost for a web site?"

This is probably our most often asked question, and not one that can be answered without going through our discovery process. If you went to a builder and asked how much it costs for a house, he would say it depends ...are we talking a massive mansion or a 1 bedroom starter home. The concept is exactly the same for web sites.

During our discovery process we try to learn as much as we can about our clients, how they serve their customers, who are their competitors and most importantly what they want to achive from their web site. From this imformation we put together a comprehensive proposal which will help them achieve their goals. It is only after we have gone through this process that we can give them an accurate price.

With any web site there a two types of cost to consider:-

• Initial Set Up costs
• Recurring Costs

The intial costs will depend upon the size and functionality requirements of the site, whether it will be optimized for performance in the search engines (SEO ,search engine optimization), will it be integrated with a content management system (CMS)

The recuring costs cover things like domain name renewal, hosting costs, general web maintenance, additional search engine optimization, pay per click management etc.

Our discovery process and proposal preparation is always free, so if you are looking to cost out your next web project we would love to hear from you.

Another great printer for your design projects

I recently had some business cards printed for a project and decided to give another printer a try. My usual printer is http://www.printingforless.com/, I have been very happy with their service and results. However a quick Google search brought up http://www.vistaprint.com/ and after a few minutes looking through their web site the price for their premium business cards was rather appealing. I placed the order and recieved the cards within the week. The quality was great.



My first order resulted in a flood of emails from Vista Print with offers for free this and free that. I thought I'd take advantage of one of these offers...not exactly free as they charge for design upload..around $4.00 if my memory serves me right. And then there was shipping. I opted for the slow shipping but recieved my oversized postcards within the week. But another great result, 5he printing was crisp and clean and the colors spot on.

I will definately be using them again

Color Punch..another new theme for iGoogle users.

Google recently index another theme I created for their iGoogle dash board.

The theme, titled Color Punch, is dynamic changing 7 times throughtout the day. The designs and color are pretty" in your face" hence the name. So far the theme has had great reviews and ratings

"Great theme! Love the way it changes colors - and how often it changes. Brilliant designs and colors. Great job - thanks!"

To use any of our themes click here

New i Google theme: Perfect Petals

Looking to brighten up you i google page? Try our "Perfect Petals" a dynamic theme which changes throughout the day.

Get the theme by visiting this HERE




To see the full directory of themes designed by Indigo Image visit HERE

Support for Small Business in Wildwood, Mo

Starting a new business is an exciting process and small business owners need all the support they can get.

A new Pediatric and Adult Massage practice has recently opened in Wildwood. Owner, Wendy Godwin, is currently offering 50% off your first massage.

The business is located close to the Wildwood town center:-

Wildwood Heath & Wellness Center
1617 Manchester Road,
Wildwood, Mo.

Email Wendy here to find out more

Free Photoshop Book from Sitepoint.

I came across this free ebook a few days ago while visiting sitepoint.com. They publish a really great selection of books relating to the design and development of web sites. One of my favorites is "Designing without Tables using CSS

The freebie on offer, while it doesn't teach me anything new, it is a great reference to those new to photoshop, so I thought I would share. Here is what they say about it:-

"The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques is the ultimate Photoshop compendium for web designers.
It’s brimming with tried and tested real-world Photoshop solutions that will add impact to your next web design project. If you’ve ever been stuck for inspiration, have puzzled over just how to create a shiny aqua-style button, or wanted to create that seamlessly tiling background image you saw on a site recently, you need download this book. "

The book is available for download for a limited time so if you want it act fast.

Download Now!

Your web site...is it time to re design?

Re-design is a natural cycle of having a web site. What worked well ...say eight years ago, may not be performing up the mark for you today. While many changes can be made by a little web maintenace here and there, there comes a time when only a full scale redesign is going help you accomplish your objective.

But how do you know when that time has come? Here are four tell-tale signs that the time has come to re-design.

1. Your Business has grown or changed
   While any good web site will be designed so it can accomodate moderate business growth, if your business is booming and you have extended your service offering it is likely that your original web site is not doing you justice. The same goes if you have changed the direction of your business.



2. Outdated Design
   You only get one chance to make a first impression and if the overall look/feel of your site is radically "behind the times" you can lose credibility. If your site features animated clipart, is coded as frames or looks like a "Front Page template you are the victim of an outdated design!



3. Your information lacks organization
   If you have been adding to your site over the years it is likely that your navigation has become a little confused. Making your visitors "think" when navigating will not engage them to the same extend as a well thought out navigation and information structure.



4. Poor Performace in the Search engines
   Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn't designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.

If any of these senarios describe your web site contact us at info@indigoimage.com to see how we can help bring you up to date in the web world.

Color and mood: A rainy day pick me up.

We are facing another rainy day in St Louis today and greeted by a rather gray sky again this morning it got me thinking about color and mood. For me gray is most definately a mood downer. I like bright vibrant colors and a blue sky with bright sunshine is an instant pick me up.

So if the St Louis weather is not going to cooperate today how about this for a digital pick me up. This was designed using Adobe Illustrator and is currently being incorporated into a dynamic iGoogle theme called color punch. It is not yet in the Google themes directory but you can get it via inthemes



If you are interested in Meaning and Associations of color read one of our previous posts

iGoogle Theme: showcase

One of the best places to find quality themes for your iGoogle home page is at www.inthemes.com. Every week they feature one of the themes from their directory on their site; this week it is one I recently created called The Boffins


Here is what they have to say


Theme of the Week: The Boffins
Every week here at inThemes we like to showcase one of our favorite themes by applying it to our own homepage. This week it's The Boffins by Zoe Feast, but why does it always make me think of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew?

Like it? Get it!

Another new theme for iGoogle

If you use iGoogle and your search page has a header that looks like this



did you know that Google now offers a directory of themes that allow you to customize the look of their interface?

They have just included a dynamic theme I created, which feature two boffins in a chemistry lab. The theme changes five times thoughout the day and follows the boffins as things go a little awry in their lab.




Click here to use this theme , if you don't have one already you will need a free gmail account

Dynamic design for i Google.

A couple of months back I wrote a couple of posts on i Google, Google's approach to personailzing their interface
Are you using i Google?
New Themes for i google

Google have taken the theme approach one step further and now it is possible to create your own theme to share with the world.

A blogger client recently asked me to create an i google theme to compliment his web site. I put together a dynamic theme which features "Mr Bison" at his computer oblivious to the happening around him. The theme changes 5 times during the day.



I have had some great feedback from users who have installed this theme

"THIS is the kind of creativity we should see in these themes! Thanks for putting some thought into & taking the time to *create* something original! Nice use of colors, too. Outstanding!"

"Great colors . . . easy on the eyes. A super creative theme. Thanks, Zoe Feast, for making my Google a happier place!"

To customize your i google page Click here for the "Mr Bison's Day" theme.

Eye of a St Louis Web Designer.

With the predicted winter storm to hit St Louis today I thought I would share with you some fabulous photographs from the recent ravages of winter in China.

Now this is what I call ice accumulation!

Color Creativity and Inspiration for Web Site Design

When working on a web design project, inspiration can come from many sources. Estabilshing a color palette is often where I begin and a great resource is COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is a color and design community that offers a wealth of resources for picking colors and staying on top of color trends and is great for kick starting inspiration.

"Business contact manager has encountered a problem and needs to close"

Don't you just hate it when you computer goes wrong. I have had my fair share of computer glitches already this year. Maybe I am getting them all over and done with in January and the rest of the year will be plain sailing.

Yesterday I upgraded my version of Quick Books resulting in a complete melt down of Outlook. It would not open and every time I tried I was greeted with the message.

"Business contact manager has encountered a problem and needs to close"

It has taken me 5 hours to sort this problem out but only thanks to an excellent post I found on Google Answers

I was so thankful for the advice I thought it worthy of a link just in case anyone else is encountering the same problem. St Louis web designer tip of the day!

Our approach to designing web sites

We follow a very methodical process in the creation of web site , here is a simple description of our process...what I like to call the 4 D's


Phase 1 : Define
During this stage we learn from our clients the full scope of their project.

• What do they want to achieve with the website?
• Who is the target audience?
• Who is the competition?

Armed with this information a tactical plan is developed and a full proposal produced to proceed with the project.
This phase of any project is always FREE

Phase 2 : Design
Keeping in mind usability and good web practices a polished concept design is created. This is a collaborative phase where client's feedback is used to refine the design and helps us "home in" on the optimimal "winning" concept design.
Our tools of chice for the design phase are Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Phase 3: Develop
The "pictures" created in the design phase comes to life in the development phase of the project. The designs are coded to be understood by web browsers and undergo strict testing to ensure cross browser compatibility. Any functionailty assocaited with a web site is added during this stage.

Phase 4: Deploy
Once the site is complete it is ready to be launched online. The site is uploaded to a hosting account and publicised to the world.

New themes from iGoogle: Eye of a St Louis Web Designer

Recently introduced by Google are five new themes that can be used on your personalized iGoogle page.

My favourite is the Solar System which displays a different view of the solar system daily. The four other themes change dynamically throughout the day.

Solar System

J. R ..a friendly Giant monster

Autumn

Hong Kong

Aja Tiger

Blog widget: The web poll.

Blogs are becoming an increasingly popular marketing tool for companies, both big and small. They allow you to update your readers with company news, offer tips, tricks, promote products. The list is endless.

Blogs can now also be enhanced with widgets.Widget are small applications which have a specific function to perform on a blog or web site.For example some widgets allow you to show videos play music, and while this might not be relevant to a business blog there are plently of widgets out there that are.

For example a web poll widget.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Widgets like increase the interactivity with your readers just that one step further. They require little technological know how to add...cut and paste some code and your are ready to go.
What's more most of them are free.

Image Optimization: Improve the load time of your web site or blog

For the average web site or blog most of the load time is a result of the images on the page, the bigger the image files, the longer it takes for the page to completely download.

To improve download time, professional web designers will go though an image optimization process where the images on a site are fine tuned via a balance of file size vs image quality.

The following picture of some nice juicy fall apples illustrate the process. The settings used to save the image were adjusted but it is not until you look at image 4 that a noticable degredation appears. In this case Image 3 would be selected having the best combination of low file size and image quality.

Although we use professional graphics software to optimize there are plently of free ulitilies available to do the hard work for you. My favorite is Net Mechanic ..here you can upload your image and it is presented in varous optimized forms. Pick the image that best suits your need, right click and "save picture as".

Image 1 : file size=14.1 Kb	Image 2 : file size=8.66 Kb
Image 3 : file size=4.58 Kb	Image4 : file size=3.02Kb

Celebrating a blog milestone

Writing a blog takes commitment. Obviously there is the element of time it takes to write a post but there is also the commitment to deliver quality content and post regularly.

Today we are celebrating our 200th post!

A tool I have recently started using to read blogs is Google Reader Another great free application from Google, Google reader allows you to subscribe to your favorite blogs and then delivers any new posts to your iGoogle page via a widget. (For more information on iGoogle see this post). Using the reader allows you to keep up to date with the blogs that interest you and saves time from actually visiting the blogs.

St Louis Web Designer - tip of the week

Ok this has nothing what so ever to do with designing web sites but a is a tip for all those St Louis gardeners battling with deer infested gardens. This is a nugget of gold found online and provides a very cost effective way of protecting your plants from " deer digestion" Many web designers I know are very keen gardens so I felt I should share

Ingredients:-

2 eggs
1 cup of skimmed milk
1 cup of water
2 tablespoons of dish detergent

Put all ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth. Pour mixture into a old "409" type spray bottle. Spray all the plants in your garden that the deer like to eat.

The deer are repelled by the smell of rotting eggs... but I have been unable to detect much of a odor. It is cost effective and bio-degradable.

I whip up a batch of this a week and it does the trick

Free web site analysis

How is your web site performing, are you achieving your online objectives?
Does the design of your site reflect your marketing materials giving you a branded image?
Is the navigation on your site making your visitors think too much?

These are some of the questions we will address during the evaulation of our
FREE WEB SITE ANALYSIS

If you are looking to better your online presence contact us today at info@indigoimage.com and we will review your site for free.