Web Tips – Page 3 – Eloine's Blog

Every website is unique

January 1, 2016February 23, 2016Eloine

One of the joys about being a designer is that everyone has a different story and your job is to realize that story for your client. Many times a client actually knows what they want but they can’t work the tools to tell it like they imagine it.

Below is a recent website creation for a cowboy poet with the flare of the colorful. Colorful in art as well as in language. Paul Zarzyski has been a former bronco rider and a cowboy poet touring the rodeos for a number of years. He has quite a number of poems that are outside the realm of rodeo and last year he published a book of those poems. This year he has published a double CD hardback and digital flip-book with a variety of awarding backup musicians providing the soundtrack to his poetry readings.

This website highlights Paul’s new package available from Amazon, CDBaby, iTunes and other outlets. The artwork was provided by renowned artist Larry Pirnie, a master of the electric color pallet and images of the American West.

Have a look through the website but don’t get lost in all the ZZ’z. As I said every website is unique!

Copyright range on your website

October 3, 2015January 22, 2017Eloine

Do you need a copyright symbol?

You technically don’t need a copyright to protect yourself but it is a reminder that your work is just not free for the taking and the thought is that in court it’s much harder for a person to claim they didn’t realize they couldn’t use your work if you have the copyright notice visible on your site.

One little detail that I see often overlooked is the date in the footer. People will put a copyright there with just one year – the year the site was created. But a website and especially a blog is constantly changing so therefore it should have a copyright range because all of your work is protected from the first design to the last design. Read more →

Nifty QR Code

July 21, 2015April 9, 2016Eloine

Ever see those ugly black and white things that were all the rage a few years back called QR codes? Well they had the potential of being something great but they were pretty ugly and the technology just wasn’t on everybody’s phone to make it that useful.

I discovered ounchtag.com today and made my own QR code that is melded with an image. I think it looks pretty cool! Give it a try and let me know what you think.

If you don’t know what a QR are code is you can read more about it here.

UPDATE:

No sooner did I post about this that I found a place to use one! One of my clients is a writer and here is a bookmark advertising her books page. The site is not yet live but she will be able to use this bookmark at conferences to take her to her website and to links to buy her book.

How to share a youtube video fullscreen

June 24, 2015March 22, 2016Eloine

It’s easy enough to click the full screen mode on a video but what if you would like to share a video already viewable in the large size? Perhaps you want to embed a link on your web site that doesn’t show all the other youtube clutter? You just want the video to take over the view. Not sure why youtube has hidden this but for now the solution below seems to work.

The URL for a video you find on youtube for example looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0eHPrT_Wjo

This is just going to show you something that looks like this:

The trick to get full screen is to delete “watch?v=” and replace that with “v/”

Below is the changed web link. Copy and paste the link below in the browser to test!

https://www.youtube.com/v/r0eHPrT_Wjo

Photographing college graduation

May 22, 2015September 3, 2015Eloine

I was asked to photograph the Los Medanos College 2015 graduation ceremony a couple of days ago. It happened to be the largest one they had yet and that meant over 400 graduates! Needless to say I have over 2,000 images I needed to whittle down through and make sure I tried to show most everyone while still capturing the fun of the event. We use these photos not only to document the night but they are great marketing pieces to remind potential students what they are working towards.

The trick to getting maximum exposure is to get through these photos fast before the momentum of the event wears off and that is where some handy software can help. I used Adobe lightroom to quickly star the photos I was going to keep based on the thumbnails. Then I batched adjusted the exposure on some that were a little light struck. Then I did a little cropping and then exported them as decent sized jpegs.

Here is where the cool part comes in. To make a web gallery or a slideshow can take hours but not so when you use the free templates that weebly offers you. They offer free blogs and web hosting and what’s even cooler is you can download the pages and keep a copy for hosting elsewhere.

Another free little tool I just found out about is Pro Show Web that allows you to quickly make a slideshow with 15 images or less and set it to music.

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Web page count tip

April 21, 2015Eloine

Sometimes the seemingly simplest question is the hardest to answer!

There are times when you just want to know how many web pages are on a domain. It would be easy just to give a total of the number of files on the sever however that tells you the number total of all the images, web pages and other documents. If you just want to know how many web pages there are here is a little trick I learned.

Go to google.com on a desktop machine. Didn’t seem to work on my iPad
Type in site:www.yourdomain.com (change “yourdomain.com” to be yours of course!)
Note the little gray numbers under the search. This is how many pages are on the site

NOTE: this is a great way to browse the content of a site that hasn’t linked to all their content or their content is buried deep in their site.

See below of an 8 page site I designed.

Now look at how many pages the college site has that work for!

Web store sneak peak

March 7, 2015Eloine

I don’t usually show a website until it’s mostly finished but I am excited about my new pet photo stock store I am setting up. As of this post I have only formatted 6 photos for sale because I wanted to focus on getting all the details right before adding more. I am using gumroad for the store engine and I coded the page to be responsive so hopefully when you view this on any device you can see the thumbnails fairly large in either 3, 2 or one column. Be sure to sign up for my mailing list to be alerted when I add new photos at the bottom of the page!