Suitable image editing programs

The most commonly used and probably the best programs to use for saving your images for your website are

1 – Photoshop: You no longer have to pay a high price tag for this program anymore as it’s available for a reasonable monthly subscription fee and you can download it to more than once computer at time. It’s compatible with Mac and PC.

2 – Gimp: This is a widely used open source program which is a fantastic for editing images and optimising images for the web, you will also need to install the save for web plugin

Video Tutorial

Here is a video tutorial that takes you through the process of optimising images for your website or blog using Photoshop CS5. It’s the same process for CS4 and CS6.

How have you optimised your images for your website?

Use the comment box below to join in the conversation.

The post How to Optimise Images for Your Website or Blog appeared first on Shortie Designs.

Although e-books come in many different publication types with the most common being PDF, EPub and Mobi, this post will focus on the PDF format for your e-book because it’s quick, easy to make and can be read across virtually all tablets and smart phones.

1. Write suitable content

Before you start your e-book, think carefully about what you want to write about. You can present tutorials, business tips, collate long articles of your work or digitally reproduce a whole book. Make sure the content is suitable for your audience, and something that they consider useful. This way you’ll be sure to get the engagement you want on your site. A good idea is to do some research into other businesses similar to yours and look at the type of e-books they’re making.

2. Get it proofed

Before you publish it to you website, make sure you have someone else read the e-book. Get them to check it on a tablet, smartphone or kindle. This will help you ensure that the content is suitably laid out and presented in a way that makes sense in context to the reader. It also ensures it’s free from spelling errors and the writing flows properly. Send a copy to your editor, a colleague or trusted peer who can give you clear feedback.

3. How to make your e-book

What you’ll need:

• Image editing software
• Word processing software

If you’re including images in your e-book, first make sure you’ve optimised your images properly for the web to reduce file size and enable it to be downloaded quickly. Good programs are:

• Photoshop (now available as a monthly subscription, this makes it much more affordable)
• Gimp and the save for web plugin (free software PC and Mac compatible)

These programs run on either Mac or PC and use the ‘save for web’ options in both to optimise your images for web.

Tools for writing and creating your e-book

There are plenty of programs that can help you design and make an e-book, but for a simple PDF,  you can just use the following programs:

• MS Word (Mac and PC)
• Pages (Mac only)

Create your document in Word or Pages and insert all your optimised images. Both these programs give you templates so you can choose something more interesting than the default document layout.

Once you’ve finished you can create your e-book in the following ways:

To create your e-book in Word you simply select File > Save As and select the ‘PDF’ format from the drop down menu. This will then save a copy of your file as a PDF.

Pages is a little different, and in fact gives you the option to save your content as ePub. However to convert your content into PDF all you do is simply select File >Export and select PDF. You would have already optimised your images so the document isn’t too big, so make sure you choose ‘image quality’, best.

Of course if you want something more advanced, Adobe InDesign has incredible features to make complex PDF’s, but is a steep learning curve if you’ve never used Adobe software before.

4. Check your file size

Make sure the file you’ve saved is no more than 2-3MB in size. This way people can download it quickly without any issues and won’t take up too much space on their tablet or smartphone.

5. How to distribute

There’s a couple of ways you can distribute your e-book on your website or blog.

1 – Sell it on your site. If you choose this option you can add your e-book to your site as a product for people to buy. To get an idea of what to charge, have a look at similar e-books in your industry and check out how they are priced.

2 – Offer it for free in return for newsletter signup. This is a great way to build your subscriber list and building engagement with your business. It’s a simple process of uploading the e-book to your server or website (if you use a CMS like WordPres) and then add the link in your subscriber confirmation email. People can automatically download the e-book once they’ve confirmed their subscription.

3 – Give it away.  This isn’t common but it might be useful as a timed promotion to draw more traffic to your site, it could be a good way to launch a new website, product or blog.

Recently Shortie Designs worked with the talented artist Jody Pearl on her new website Sew Outside the Lines. The e-book is automatically sent to people who sign up and subscribe to the mailing list. This technique has dramatically increased the subscriber list which has helped boost workshop bookings and engagement with Jody’s stunning textile work.

If you’d like to talk to Shortie Designs about ways to engage your audience with your website, feel free to contact us with some details.

How have you used e-books on your website to boost engagement with your business?

Use the comment box below to join in the conversation.

The post How to Make Your Own E-Book appeared first on Shortie Designs.

1. Know Your Website Goals

What is the purpose of your site and how is it supporting your business? Are you trying to gain sales leads, bookings, provide information, increase newsletter signups or sell products? Whatever the case, you need to be very clear about your website goals so you can design and build the site accordingly. Once you identify these, you’ll be able to measure the success of your website better and know how it’s performing against your goals.

2. Make is Usable

Usability: Measure of the ease of use on a website by its visitors.

- Web definitions

Your website might be the latest responsive CSS3/HTML5 bootstrapped bonanza, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that your visitors can interact with your site in a way that’s meaningful for them. Making sure your site is user friendly helps your visitors complete tasks successfully, engaging visitors and helping conversion.

Usability is a complex and detailed component of good web design, however here are a few pointers to get you started. Implement these accordingly and you’re on your way to helping your visitors achieve the goals you’ve set out for your site, thus

a) Navigation: Make sure your navigation is intuitive and consistent. Not everyone enters your site via the home page so keep navigation consistent across the site and use obvious page names to categorise different parts of your site.

b) Readability: Make sure your text is readable and not obscured by background images or distracting animated elements. Use a decent size font size, Smashing Magazine advises 16px (0.063 em) for body copy. This will of course depend on the type of font that you use.

c) Write for the web: Remember, people read differently on the web than on print. Give your content some room to breathe. Use white space to break up content and don’t be afraid of breaking information up into paragraphs. Small amounts of clear and concise copy will engage your visitors far better than too much information. You can read more here about writing copy for the web.

d) Link recognition: Ensure that your hyperlinks are easy to recognise, so make sure they stand out from your normal body copy. Colour and underline link text so that users don’t ever have to guess where they need to click.

e) Information design: Place important information to the top left of the page (if you are making a website in English). According to research English speakers spend most of their time at the top left of the site.

f) User centered approach: Rather than thinking about all the functions, widgets and slideshows that you think will make your site the coolest kid on the block, think about what your user needs to achieve their goals.  Work from here to map out the type of content and functionality for your site.

3. Write Fresh and Engaging Content

Good content will engage your visitors and encourage them to come back. So whether it’s regular blog posts or updated galleries, videos or information, keep it regular and fresh. Make sure you let people know about your new content too, either through your social media profiles, or by enabling people to subscribe to your content by email or sending out updates in regular e-bulletins.

4. Use Quality Photographs

The web is a visual environment, so if you use photographs for your website make sure they are good quality and optimised for the web. This is particularly the case if your site is an online store or gallery; beautifully shot images will get buy in much quicker. So instead of posting those grainy backyard shots of your home made boutique furniture, get some high quality professional photographs that show your product in the actual environment it’s going to be used. Make sure your images are then properly optimised for your website so it doesn’t impact on speed and load time, because a slow site will only drive visitors away.

5. Monitor and Analyse

If you haven’t already installed Google Analytics on your website, then now’s the time! This free and very powerful analytics tool can give you information about how long visitors stay on your site, what they’re reading, the browser or device they’re using when they access your site, or even where they are in the world. All very useful in measuring how your website is performing and how you can better target your content.

6. Mobile Friendly

We’re in the midst of a mobile revolution and more people are accessing the internet on their smart phones and tablets than ever. How is your site performing in these devices? Now’s the time to check. You may have heard of responsive websites, but if you haven’t, responsive websites are designed to fit to any browser no matter what the size. It’s a great way to make sure your site is smart device friendly without having to build an app or a mobile version of your site (thus saving you money and time).

Use your analytics to see what content your visitors’ browse to when they’re on their smart devices. Often it’s contact details, services or information about your business. Responsive design is a clever thing and you can use it to show targeted information easier to your visitors on their devices. This is a great way to help people engage with your business no matter where they are.

What do you think? How do you make the most out of your business website?

Use the comment box below to join in the conversation.

The post 6 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Business Website appeared first on Shortie Designs.

Backup Buddy Slides

How to use Backup Buddy – Video Tutorial

Or watch the video on Vimeo

The post Using Backup Buddy to Backup and Migrate a Site appeared first on Shortie Designs.

Here are a few small business web design tips to help you plan your website so that it’s effective, meets the needs of your business and delivers content to your visitors in an engaging way so you can thrive online.

1. Get to Know Your Business

What are the main functions of your business, what does it do? Once you understand these you can start to develop content for your website that will speak to your business effectively.

Does your business:

a) provide services?
b) sell products?
c) make or create work (as a photographer/artist/designer)?
d) provide training/consultation?

Knowing what your business does will help you determine what your website should do. Determining the underlying reason for you having your site will make it far more useful and therefore an asset to you business.

2. Know your target

Who’s your target audience? This can help determine the look, feel and functionality of the site, as well as find the appropriate ‘tone’ for the copy to suit your target’s needs and expectations.

Some questions you can ask are:
- what is your target’s age, gender, economic status, social behavior?
- what are their habits?
- what kind of jobs do they have – do they even have a job?
- where do they hang out – is it online or in certain locations?
- what will people expect to do once they’re on your website?

Doing some research to really understand your audience will help determine a more user focused approach to your website, matching the needs of your audience to the site’s functionality. This builds better engagement and conversion.

3. Focus on benefits not features

For small business web design strategies, focus on the benefits of your business, rather than just the features. This helps you engage your audience and spell out why your product or service is something they want to use.

For example if you have an online shop that offers a money back guarantee on wrong choices, make sure you articulate the benefit of this. It means your visitors can buy your products confident that even if they make the wrong decision or change their mind, they have the option to get their money back. This alleviates some of the common concerns with online shopping and builds trust between them and your business.

4. Tell your story

You want to stand out right? Rather than the usual ‘about us’ page, use a story to tell the history of your business. Be truthful of course, but let your readers see the interesting side to your business. People love stories and they keep people interested, which helps people connect to your business much easier.

5. Pictures are important

Last but in no way least, don’t skimp on photography! Use pictures that are interesting but also accurately represent your business (don’t false advertise). If you don’t have good quality photographs, find a photographer, don’t do it yourself unless you have a secret photographic gene. The money you spend on professional photography is an investment that will make a big impact on how your website performs online. A website without pictures is like a food with no flavour. It’s functional, does the job but it won’t be interesting and people wont be compelled to stay on your site to find out more, which is the point right?

Other resources

Using Images for Conversion
Storytelling in Business

What do you think? Have any good ideas for small business web design strategies?

Use the comments box below to join in the conversation.

The post Tips for Effective Small Business Web Design appeared first on Shortie Designs.

I  had the privilege of presenting at the 2012 WordCamp in Sydney in July. For those who missed the talk or want to view the links and resources in the presentation, below is my slideshow from SlideShare. Please feel free to share, tweet, and ask questions.

The post Building Community with WordPress – 2012 Sydney WordCamp Presentation appeared first on Shortie Designs.

We use the web to find and share information. The way in which users interact with information online combined with the rise of new Google algorithms (which prioritise relevant content) means how we write and stucture information online is becoming more crucial then ever. Here I’ll outline some helpful tips for planning copy for your next website or online project.

Break Content Up

Make sure you break content up into manageable sizes. Use succinct teaser copy for images and use hierachical document structure such as headings and subheadings in the body of your site. This way readers can easily scan over your page to find what they are looking for. Studies show that readers don’t actually read web pages word for word, unless they find something they are really interested in. So breaking your content up enables people to interact with your information quickly.

Make it Keyword Rich

People search for everything, for information, products, services, ideas, even other people and because of this it’s important that you understand how to make your content found. When you plan your copy, look at the content and think about how people would search for your content. What keyword phrases or words would they use? To take it one step further use a keyword analysis tool, like Google Keyword Tool (free) or use the free trial version of Wordtracker. There are plenty of other tools out there so just do a some research or ask for recommendations.

Once you’ve determined keywords, weave these into your content. Remember, don’t go overboard, search engines will recognize keywords being used for the sake of it. Keep the keywords relevant to your information and you will be fine, Google values this higher than anything else.

The Power of Headings

Headings draw your readers in quickly and are also great for SEO. Think about a newspaper and how the headings are utlised to attract readers. Keep your headings keyword rich, succinct and make sure they are enclosed in title tags so they can be found by search engines.

Describe Benefits

Describe the benefits of your business, brand or organisation. Yes provide nitty gritty information where needed, but to engage readers first, tell them how they will benefit from what you have to offer rather than just the features of what you have to offer. Connect your services or product with how it will make their life better and why. This is particularly useful for your home page which is the first place people will interact with your business or organisation. Here you want to capture people’s attention and then you can go into detailed information on other pages of your site.

Edit and Feedback

Read your content out loud, how does it flow? One of the best ways to make sure your content is reading well is to get peer feedback. Ask a colleague or peer that you trust to give you feedback on grammar/spelling and particularity on the content itself. Is it communicating your business properly? Do they get enough information or are they left asking questions? Sometimes when we’re close to something it’s hard to know if we’ve missed describing a crucial piece of information about our business or organisation. Having someone read through your copy will help provide a thorough approach to your content writing.

What Do You Think?

Have you got any other tips for writing good web copy? Use the comment form below to let me know your thoughts.

The post Tips for Writing Effective Web Copy appeared first on Shortie Designs.

So you know it, you’ve read about it, Pinterest is gaining more traction as a social media heavyweight and to make sure you can join the conversation, below are some quick ways to add Pinterest to your website or blog.

Add a Follow Button

Head over to Pinterest goodies and you’ll see a few tools for pimping up your website or blog to include Pinterest. You can copy and paste the code for the ‘follow’ button and add it anywhere on your blog or website. There are different sizes and types of buttons and when click on the one you like, the code snippet is revealed.

If you’ve got a WordPress site or blog, you can paste this code into a text widget on the sidebar or footer.

Add a Pin It Button

You can add the Pinterest ‘Pin It’ button anywhere on your site or blog so that people can pin your content to their Pinterest boards. To encourage people to pin to their boards, make sure you include a good image which will represent your page or post. If you’re a photographer, designer or artist, this is a great way to encourage people to pin your work to their boards. If you’re concerned about copyright, head over to the Pinterest copyright section to read more about how they are handling this issue. If you want to find out more, there are also plenty of posts and information out there about how the community is handling copyright too.

If you have a WordPress site or blog, you can add the ‘Pin It’ button through a plug in, I use the Pin It On Pinterest plug in which allows you to select what image you want your readers to pin to their boards. Easy to use and quick to set up. NB: the ‘Pin It’ button won’t appear unless you specify an image in the custom fields at the bottom of your post editor screen.

So there you have it, a few easy steps to get your website or blog ready to integrate with Pinterest. Have fun!

The post How to Add Pinterest to Your Website or Blog appeared first on Shortie Designs.

So you’ve signed up to Pinterest and now you want to know how to start using it to really help build momentum and engagement. Here are 5 ways to use Pinterest for your organisation and business.

1. Pin to your website

As discussed in my post Tips to Get You Started on Pinterest make sure you pin news and information from your website to your Pinterest profile and link back to your website.

2. Pin your videos

Perhaps you’re working on a video campaign for your organisation or business. If you have a YouTube or Vimeo account, pin your videos to Pinterest. This is another really useful way to drive people to your videos.

3. Tailor your boards to certain people or clients

Create boards that target specific clients or people who engage with your business or organisation. Pin resources, information or upcoming news that will interest people and encourage them to follow you.

4. Share stories

Start a board where other people can contribute stories or reviews about their experience with your organisation or business.

5. Integrate on Your Blog or Website

Add a ‘Pin it’ or ‘follow’ button to your blog or website to make sure your followers can visit your boards.

Want to start pinning? If you haven’t signed up yet the fastest way to get an account is to request an invite so feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to invite you.

The post 5 Ways to Use Pinterest for Your Business or Organisation appeared first on Shortie Designs.

The new social bookmarking site is really gaining some clout, so if you’re new to Pinterest, don’t worry, this post will help you get started so you can give it a try and see if it works for you.

Pinterest is muscling in on some of the big social media sites and gathering a lot of momentum. This global online pin board enables users to pin pictures of items that they like, want to keep and share. It’s like making a collage of all the things that interest you, and you can organise them by board categories, while tweeting them out or posting them to Facebook.

So to help you get started on Pinterst – I’ve put together a few tips to help you utilise this new visual networking tool.

Request an invite

Before you begin – you need to request an invite to start a profile. It’s no biggie, just request an invite with your email address and you’ll receive a link and some information to help you get started pretty quickly.

Look around

If you’re anything like me and you can spend hours looking at images or photographs, then you’ll find Pinterest full of wonderful imagery, illustrations, photographs, links and so on. Take the time when you first start your profile to check out other profiles and see how other people/organisations/businesses are using Pinterest. You can run a search on an area of  interest or just browse particular categories.

Know your story

Once you’ve got  your boards all setup, think about your ‘story’ and how you can convey it visually. Think about what images work and what images don’t, again have a look at other profiles to get an idea of this. A visual social networking site by nature is better suited to certain types of businesses or campaigns so it’s good to work out how ‘your story’ can be read visually.  So if you’re a designer, artist, photographer or selling products, Pinterest will work very easily for you. If you’re not any of these things, that’s ok, you can still find a way to use Pinterest, you might just have to think out of the box to find a way to communicate your story visually.

Gathering followers

Once you’ve established this, of course like with any social media network – the key is time, consistency and knowing who you’re ‘talking’ to. Spend time checking your profile and viewing other profiles of interest, following and uploading new pins will help you connect with other ‘pinners’ and generate interest.

Follow correct pin etiquette

Before you know it you’ll be finding other pins that you like, and you’ll want to share them, so make sure you check out the Pinterest etiquette to ensure that you credit your pins correctly.

Pin your website or blog

Like any other social media network, link back to your  blog or website when you make updates. Pin the images of your latest posts, news, events, campaigns, exhibitions to your board and link back to your website. Here are a couple of ways to do this.

1. Using the ‘Pin It’ bookmarklet from your browser
2. Creating screen shots using a plug in for Google Chrome or Firefox.  Note that the screen shot plug in for Firefox only works on PC.

Which ever way you choose, make sure you add a good description and the correct link back to your website (use the full web address that starts with the http://).

Pinterest is a great way to supplement your other social media strategies and it looks like it’s here to stay! So jump on over and check it out.

Want to know more? Check out:

1. About Pinterest
2. Getting Started on Pinterest
3. Pintest Blog

The post Tips to get you started on Pinterest appeared first on Shortie Designs.