In the world of graphic design, web design and branding – photography can make or break your campaign. Often, scheduling a photo shoot is the best way to create a unique image that cannot be replicated, but in the beginning stages of developing a business, stock photography is a great option that saves money. Now that royalty-free stock photography has become so readily available and affordable, it’s easier to create a stunning brand identity without breaking the bank. Even better, there are many websites that offer free stock photography – either their entire collection is free or they will offer a portion of free images with others that can be purchased. Be sure to read the fine print because many photographers will allow usage only if you give them credit. Also be sure to check if the photography is available for commercial or personal use.

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1. Stock.XCHNG

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2. PhotoXpress

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3. stockvault

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4. Photo Laboratory

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5. Free Pixels

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Meetup.com is an extremely powerful resource for people in all industries looking to collaborate on a wide variety of topics in a relaxed meeting setting (the groups often get together monthly or bi-weekly).

Skybox Creative recently attended a Meetup for Refresh SD, a group that includes web developers, internet marketers, techies, etc.. The topic: discussing client management and client requests – yes, a complicated matter. This topic often comes up in the web design and branding industry, because it is important to clearly define project scope and rounds of changes before starting a project that has been estimated out.

A few good tips and resources:

• Give clients a questionnaire prior to starting a project (Skybox uses a Branding Analysis Questionnaire, which discusses demographics, target market, competition, look & feel – and more!)

• Project Management tools can be key to balancing work flow – Action Method is a good one, VUE is a good way to describe logic or the development of a back end system

• OfficeTime is a great tool for tracking hours

• Clearly define client deliverables (copy, photos, feedback)

We are huge fans of Google! Not only do they provide the best in search results, but they offer a variety of free services that make our lives easier. Honestly, if you haven’t looked into all the products that Google has to offer, you really should. Each working day, every staff member at Skybox Creative has at least one Google app open in their web browser.

From the awesome Google Calendar that lets you share your schedule or embed on your website to Google Wave for collaborative projects, Google Feedburner to update followers of new blog posts right to their inbox, to Google Docs for file sharing and form tracking…Google has what you need to make your business run more smoothly!

This post is specifically about Google Docs and the ability to create surveys, or any other type of form for that matter, and track the results in a spreadsheet. You even have the option to “Show Summary of Responses” where the data is compiled into bar graphs and pie charts – so easy a child could understand. There are a variety of templates to choose from (although we hope they add more template design options or at least the ability to customize colors sooner than later, nonetheless, they get the job done). You can create a form with ease, specifying whether you want a checklist, multiple choice question, paragraph answer, etc. Once you have completed the form, you have the option to email it or embed it on a web page (see below).

The results are tracked anonymously in a spreadsheet. You also have the option to share the ‘Results’ spreadsheet through Google Docs sharing options (now available for individual docs and entire folders). We have embedded our Client Satisfaction Survey below so you can see what it looks like. We had to force the width and height of the iframe in order for it to fit in our blog – not perfect, but again, gets the job done. If you embed the form on your blog, make sure to click on the HTML tab first, then paste the code. You can easily adjust the dimensions, just make sure to calculate the proportions to make sure it displays optimally. It’s also good to know that (for whatever reason), if you tab back to Visual, it might erase the iframe code – for this reason, we recommend copy/pasting the code in a text editing application so you can grab it again if needed!

Clients ONLY: Feel free to fill out the form with your feedback! All others, if you are interested in speaking to us about the services we offer, please email us at info@skyboxcreative.com

Great Web Design is just the beginning! Being found on the search engines, particularly the leader, Google, is critical to growing and sustaining your business – that’s why SEO and social media are such prevalent topics these days. Understanding SEO can be complicated, but luckily there are tools that make it easier!

One such tool is SEO Doctor for Firefox. This tool will help you understand and diagnose SEO problems on your site as well as understand factors of success on competitor websites.

At glance

SEO Doctor is made with both beginners and experienced SEOs in mind and it’s scoring system and recommendations are based on official SEO documents, namely Google Webmaster guidelines, Google Image guidelines and Google SEO starter guide as well as my own experience from years in the profession.

Main features are:

• Points out to potential problems and assigns a score for your pages based on common SEO methodology
• Shows link structure and helps track page rank flow for your pages
• Detects and warns you about pages not indexable by search engines using comprehensive methods
• Quick one-click access to most popular SEO tools allows you to additionally inspect a site
• Fully customizable

Features

By default SEO Doctor will place itself in the browser status bar, immediately providing you with the following information (see image).

SEO Score represents the result of on-site optimization analysis of the currently viewed page. Maximum score is 100 and the green flag will indicate everything is OK. Yellow flag indicates warnings and red flag suggests that concrete SEO elements can be improved. In a special case when the current page is not indexable at all by search engines, the icon will show a special ‘no-trespassing’ icon.

Flow shows how much of the Page Rank has been preserved on the site. 100% means that you preserve 100% of all the Page Rank on your site, while 0% would mean that all outgoing links are to other sites.

Links shows number of external links/total links on the page.

Visits show estimated number of daily visitors for the site (data is retrieved from Compete.com and is available to you if you register for a free API key).

Clicking the nofollow icon allows you to instantly highlight all nofollow links on the page on and off.

Click here to read more and DOWNLOAD.

Source: www.prelovac.com

Spread the Word About PayPal and Earn Extra Cash!

As a PayPal user, you can collect up to $1,000.00 USD for each new merchant you refer. The Merchant Referral Bonus program rewards you for bringing new businesses to PayPal.

Here’s how it works:

• Log in to your PayPal account
• Get your personalized referral link to send out in emails, add as a banner to your website, or incorporate into your e-commerce application.
• Each time a new merchant signs up for a PayPal Business or Premier account via your link or banner, you’ll immediately start receiving 0.5% of their payment volume – up to $1,000.00 USD.

Here is an example of the PayPal banner you can incorporate on your website:

For more info, click here. If you don’t already have a PayPal account, make sure to click on our banner and sign up, then get your own link and share with your friends and business associates!

Amazon.com Amazon Associates provides an opportunity for people to make money by referring qualifying traffic to the Amazon.com website. Associates drive internet traffic to Amazon.com through specially formatted links that allow them to track sales and other activity. Monthly payments are made to Associates. Once you join the program, they will give you access to Associates Central, an extranet exclusive to our Associates. This is the place where you will build your links, view your traffic and earnings reports, and read about the latest news and opportunities available to you through the program.

Current participants in the Amazon Associates program include large, well-known sites, niche content sites and blogs, comparison shopping engines, search engine marketers, and everything in between.

An Amazon Associate can earn anywhere for 4% to 8.5% depending on sales volume. They have even teamed up with endless.com (a shoe, handbag and accessory retailer) to offer up to a 15% commission on qualifying traffic leads.

It only takes about 5 minutes to set up an account and your ready to integrate one of the easy-to-install options on your website. You can build Affiliate links to Amazon through a variety of banners, widgets or even your very own aStore. The aStore eCommerce option offers the opportunity to create a dedicated shopping area (with shopping cart) on your website in minutes.

Below is an example of the Carousel Widget you can easily integrate into your site.

For a list of all available Amazon.com widgets, click here. But before you go, be sure to purchase one of our recommended items above

Many people may not realize that iStock gives away 4 free stock photography images each week, in addition, they also give away 4 free vector images, 4 free videos and 4 free audio tracks every single week! Hey, everyone likes free stuff!

iStock Photo has rapidly become the number one online source for royalty free stock images at reasonable prices. iStock is not only an expansive resource for stock photography, but also provides an online community where designers and photographers can connect.

Don’t you just love the internet and the unlimited possibilities!

You can review the free archives here

They recently added The Vetta Collection, where the best-of-the-best photographers sell their top shelf stock photos for between 20-70 credits. The average credit is about $1.50 each, if you pay-as-you-go. Their standard collection ranges from about 1-22 credits. Click here to learn more

If you are a designer looking for some online recognition, you are able to submit your designs (that utilized at least one element from iStock) to their Designer Spotlight Showcase. If your design is selected, it will show up for other members to review and critique. In addition, your design will have the chance to be selected as the “Design of the Week” which is displayed on the front page of the Designer Spotlight section. If that’s not enough to motivate you, you earn free credits on iStock for every submission they accept! Skybox Creative has submitted and showcased several designs on iStock, to view them, click here

Click here to learn more about iStock Designer Spotlight

Happy Friday all!

-Angelina

When creating a new website, a key item to keep in mind while organizing your brilliant brainstorms is a sitemap. That illustrious tool – the sitemap – is a representation of the architecture of a website (according to Wikipedia). It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

Sitemaps are especially useful in planning your site. By formulating what each page should be and what should link to where, you’ll be able to streamline some of the web design process. Just like starting a business, starting a site (most definitely if it’s sales driven) requires a detailed business plan so that it can start working for you!

But even if you are just creating your own blog, you’ll want to figure in a sitemap. (Do you want a photo gallery, archives, links to related/sites?) After all, a blog or personal website is a reflection of yourself.

Don’t miss out on the big sale or lose your dream clientele because you didn’t strategize your sitemap.

View some modern sitemaps: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/modern-sitemap-and-footer/

Contact Skybox Creative if you have your sitemap in hand and want to create with us. (619.381.3825)

Skybox Creative – providing Web Design + Branding in San Diego since 2006 is now on Yelp!

As an SEO effort, we encourage our clients to get in as many online directory listings as possible. There are many highly trafficked directories that offer free listings. This can help your business in two ways, firstly it increases the likelihood of people finding you on the web, secondly it  improvs your page rank by increasing back-links to your site. For those of you who are unfamiliar with page rank, Google provides a page rank based on a scale of 1-10 that helps determine the relevancy of the information on your web site.

Here are a few online directories for San Diego businesses:

www.kudzu.com

www.bizsandiego.com

www.yelp.com

www.dmoz.com

Click here to add a comment/star rating to our business listing on YELP!

For more industry specific online directories, type your primary target keywords in any major search engine and several directories should pop up for each keyword or keyword combination. For a longer list of general business directories, contact us and we will happliy provide you with more.

There are now forty iStock Inspectors around the world. It’s their job to dig into the Queue and give every single submission the thorough eye-balling that it deserves. Many of our designs have been selected for display on the worldwide iStock community’s Designer Spotlight! Have a look at some of our featured web designs below:

Skybox Creative Web Design

http://www.istockphoto.com/design_spotlight_details.php?ID=20628

Gelato Web Design

http://www.istockphoto.com/design_spotlight_details.php?ID=11666

Skova Design Website

http://www.istockphoto.com/design_spotlight_details.php?ID=20629

Your Fit Friend Web Design + Social Network

http://www.istockphoto.com/design_spotlight_details.php?ID=20630

Century Transportation Web Design

http://www.istockphoto.com/design_spotlight_details.php?ID=20631