Technical Communication Professionals in Southwest Michigan | Prima Communications, Inc.
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The Power of Free
Posted on 17. Feb, 2011 by Jeremy in Graphic Design & Other Cool Stuff, Prima Communications Blog
At a recent expo, I had a great opportunity to give something away. It wasn’t a shirt or a pen or a donut sample (those guys were down the aisle and the smell was maddening). I gave away website maintenance, one of our core services. I did this for two reasons:
- The unselfish reason: We like to make people happy, and this guy was unhappy.
- The selfish reason: Giving it away might lead to paying business later.
I was manning our booth and offering website and documentation services to the attendees when another exhibitor walked across the aisle and asked if we work with existing websites in addition to creating new ones.
We do, I assured him.
He and I talked about his site’s issues, the most urgent being incorrect contact information and an absent developer. Of course, the site was set up to require the developer to update the contact information.
Job security for the developer, pure frustration and lost business for an unhappy client.
We talked a bit more and he agreed to send me the site’s access information. I don’t recommend this in general, but we were right across the aisle from each other. If I started doing anything shady he could have walked across and flipped my table over, so we were both comfortable with the situation.
I had a laptop in the booth, and it took about twenty minutes to log into the site, edit the contact info, and get everything up to date.
A frustrated fellow exhibitor became a happy new client. Those free twenty minutes led to a contract to redo several websites and a delighted customer who recommends us every chance he gets.
If you have an opportunity to make a difference by giving something away, do it.
You can’t afford not to.
Embedding an iframe Google Calendar in a WordPress Page
Posted on 28. Jan, 2010 by Jeremy in Graphic Design & Other Cool Stuff
This is kind of a workaround, but it’s the best solution I’ve found so far for getting a Google Calendar onto a WordPress page – including the tasty iframe!
Check out the Google Calendar working on a WordPress page here to make sure it’s what you’re looking for.
You’re going to need three things:
- A Google Calendar
- The Random / Rotating Ads V2 plugin
- The PHP Execution plugin
Get the plugins, install and activate.
Go to your Google Calendar’s settings and select the Calendar Details tab:
Then click the Calendar Address HTML button:
And click the link for the configuration tool:
Adjust your settings and copy the HTML -yes all of it, including the iframe stuff!
Go to your WordPress Tools and click Datafeedr Random Ads:
Click Add New Group at the top of the page. Name the group “calendar” (or whatever you want, without the quote marks). Paste the Google Calendar HTML into the Ad #1 field.
You can leave the Before and After fields blank:
Click Save Ad Group. Copy the line of PHP code that shows up next to your ad group:
Go to the WordPress page on which you’d like your Google Calendar. In the HTML editor, paste the line of PHP code. I had to wrap mine in “code” tags, so you may want to do the same:
Publish/Update the page and take a look at your fancy new Google Calendar page!
Check out the Google Calendar working on a WordPress page here.
Sometimes White Space Is the Best Content
Posted on 03. Jun, 2009 by Jeremy in Graphic Design & Other Cool Stuff, Prima Communications Blog
Magazines, newspapers, and TV screens are often crammed with information, graphics, and ads. There’s a good reason for this—those spaces are expensive, and the more content the producers can cram in, the more money they make—but the result can be a cluttered appearance that leaves you clueless about where you should be looking.
Luckily, that content-to-profit equation doesn’t apply to website pages. You can create as many pages as you want on your site (as long as you don’t exceed your server space limit, but that’s another story), and you should use plenty of white space to take advantage of that breathing room.
Don’t think of white space as blank areas or missing content; it’s vital for achieving a balanced look for your text and graphics, as well as for letting the viewer know where to focus his or her attention.
If you think of your webpage as a pond and drop a pebble in the upper-left corner, the density of ripples will illustrate the average visitor’s eye pattern across the page. The upper-left corner, with lots of tightly packed ripples, will get the most attention. The lower-right corner, with a few widely spaced ripples, will usually get the least attention.
Therefore, if you put your logo, contact information, and special announcements in the upper left, you’ll want to give them plenty of white space with margins and padding so the viewer can easily identify the graphic, read your phone number and email link, and see what’s new.
Skimming speed increases as viewers scan the rest of the page, so you’ll want to use even more white space to make sure those eyes land on the important images and content. If that means you have to create 10 web pages and link them instead of cramming everything on to one, so be it.
Why Does My Photoshop Text Look Pixelated?
Posted on 13. May, 2009 by Jeremy in Graphic Design & Other Cool Stuff, Prima Communications Blog
Pixelated text in Photoshop
If you’re working in Photoshop and your text looks like that, you’re probably thinking you wasted a lot of money. Fear not! The fix is quick and easy.
If you’re using CS2 or CS4 (others are probably similar, but those are the only versions I have loaded), select the layer with the text and go to Layer > Type in the top toolbar. You’ll probably see this:
Go to Layer > Type to check your anti-alias settings.
The “Anti-Alias None” setting is causing the text to appear pixelated and choppy. Anti-aliasing in this case is “the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution.” By selecting one of the other Anti-Alias settings—sharp, crisp, strong, or smooth—your text will look much better.
Sharp:
Anti-Alias Sharp
Crisp:
Anti-Alias Crisp
Strong:
Anti-Alias Strong
Smooth:
Anti-Alias Smooth
Your Competitors Are Using Meta Tags—Are You?
Posted on 28. Apr, 2009 by Jeremy in Graphic Design & Other Cool Stuff, Prima Communications Blog, Writing & Marketing
You can have your website content chock-full of keywords and all of your images Alt-tagged, but if you’re not using meta data on your pages, you’re missing out on your full search engine potential.
Do a search using the keywords for which you’d like your site to be #1 and see what comes before you. Go to those sites and in your Internet Explorer toolbar click Page > View Source. If you’re using Firefox (congrats, by the way), go to View > Page Source or install the Web Developer Toolbar, which has a View Source button.
The page source will open in a text editor (probably Notepad), and you’ll want to look for this:
<meta name=”keywords”
and this:
<meta name=”description”
See what your competitors are using for meta keywords and descriptions; if they have a high page rank, chances are good they’re using keywords that match the page’s content and unique, brief, and accurate descriptions for each page. Do the same on your pages, and you’ll have those competitors checking your source code for tips.