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

Now share your PPT and PDF presentations with the world! Simply add the SlideShare Application to your LinkedIn profile, then upload your files, up to 100MB!

You can embed the presentation with a code provided or share the URL, like you see below, with friends and business associates! Great tool. The internet is crazy!

We uploaded our corporate brochure >> Click here to view!

One of the lines that is sadly difficult to cross in the web design world is the line between designer and coder.¬† A great many designers, who have real skill don’t have the ability or patience to code a site in CSS.¬† It used to be easy to take your site in Photoshop and splice up the images, and save as web.¬† Now, with CSS validation and other standards out there, you can’t just pop this stuff out anymore.

Well, I have a little something to make the PSD to CSS voyage easy once again.  This is a free service, and though it takes some time to learn, and there are certainly some areas where hand coding is much better Рthis will at least get you feeling like it is 1999 again (at least in the east site making sense).

Now, if I may introduce to you http://psd2cssonline.com/

Enjoy!