I would like your opinion

I've just set up a website for my friend Millie; she's Overstocked with Rocks. This is the first phase, there are many, many pictures to take. Between you and me she should open a brick and mortar store.


Seriously, I would like "objective" opinions. I know that most of you are not jewelry designers looking to purchase precious and semi-precious gems, that's not the point here. I want an objective opinion of the website.

Please keep in mind the about page, and the blah, blah, blah pages have not been constructed, those aren't the important pages. I won't give you a quarter for your opinion but I'll give you a link!! That's worth a bunch more than a quarter!

Meta Tags for Newbies

When you are new to putting up a website you may not know about Meta Tags. I'm not so sure if it is absolutely necessary to know all the gory details about Meta Tags as it is important to have them on your website. I've posted an Advanced Meta Tag Generator for you in the side bar. The tool is from SEO Chat. It is all "no charge" information. You will find it helpful in regard to your traffic and building and updating your website(s). There are other tools and analysers to help you there; far more extensive than I can elaborate on here. In case you don't know the meta tags go in the Head of your web page. They identify you and the content of your website so the search engines can find you.

Copyrights

While viewing Sue Runyon Designs I noticed a small picture at the end of the page. After clicking on it I found a remarkable resource for copyright information.

If you are going to do some article writing to promote your site(s) you might find this helpful itscopyrighted.com If you are creating jewelry or writing articles make sure you are not violating copyrights. There is a hefty fine for doing so. Ignorance is no excuse!

What we have here is a Lack of Communication!

Feel the need to communicate your expertise? Need Traffic? Need Links?
Try: http://www.buzzle.com/ With categories covering everything from animals to tourism, Buzzle.com is your complete source for news, articles and information. Get the latest buzz, interact with authors and other readers on message boards, or add to the buzz by becoming a Buzzle.com author.

Here is another great way to get "your words" out: Ezine Articles

EzineArticles For Authors
Submit Articles
Members Login
Benefits
Expert Authors
Most Emailed
Most Viewed
Article Rating
Read Endorsements
Send Testimonials
Editorial Guidelines
Author TOS

This is an enormous site, well organized with very helpful information. You can communicate 'til your heart is content! Give and Get Back.

Easy Thumbnails

Easy Thumbnails is a great tool for taking any number of photos and making thumbnails is litterally a flash. Since I am totally redesigning two websites with vast amounts of photos that need to be used as a visual index (one picture is worth a thousand words)I needed a quick and easy way to make thumbnails.

I found Fookes Software, It is Great!



Easy Thumbnails is a popular free Windows utility for creating accurate thumbnail images and scaled-down/up copies from a wide range of popular picture formats. An elegant interface makes it a snap to find your images and select them for processing individually, in groups, or in whole folders, using a simple file selector and built-in image viewer. You can use slider controls to rotate images and adjust their contrast, brightness, sharpness and quality, and check out the results with the built-in viewer.



Thumbnails can be created in any existing folder or a new folder, and you can identify them clearly by adding a prefix or suffix to their filename. If you're an image-processing enthusiast, you'll enjoy having a choice of eleven resampling filters for the best possible results. You can convert small batches of images inside Windows Explorer from the File menu or with a right-click of the mouse, display thumbnails in your browser, and even take advantage of command-line switches to generate thumbnails seamlessly from other programs. You can also save your thumbnails to a Web page using a HTML template that you can easily customize to create your own layouts, and there's helpful documentation that includes full instructions and some useful tips.

Easy Thumbnails is a genuine freeware product that will not annoy you with advertising, intrusive spyware components or nag screens. It comes from the developers of the award-winning NoteTab text editors.

If you need to make thumbnails, I highly recommend this and yes I have used it many times. I give it a 10 out of 10!

Getting the Word Out about You

Some of you might be interested in publicizing your product, service or whatever you are all about. You might consider checking this out.

Big News.biz

The purpose of this site is to give businesses, individuals and journalists a trusted venue to post news and press releases. Our goal is to provide quality content from sources that are accountable for what they submit.

Every author / publisher who posts to this site is vetted through the double opt in registration. They also time-stamp and record their IP address during registration confirmation as well as for each submission. Under every approved article you can see the contact information for the publisher account and the person that submitted the article.

All content is reviewed prior to publication and must include a URL for a Web site that pertains to the article. Approved content is then published online and made available to the media, the public, search engines and other Web sites on behalf of the publisher.

Guidelines for the types of press releases and news articles we will accept are available on the -Terms of Service- page. For more information, see: http://www.bignews.biz/?go=terms

BigNews.biz is a registered LLC in the State of New York. The founders have over 30 years of experience doing staff and freelance work for major media such as Newsday, The Los Angeles Times and the AP, covering both U.S. and International stories.

BigNews.biz LLC
16 Heath Place
Garden City, New York
11530-3005 US

http://www.bignews.biz/blog/

Link Referral Update

If you are unhappy about reviews, your rating or any other problem you can remove your listing by going to the "contact page".

You will see:

"I wish to discontinue mailings or retire my account: login to your account and change your preferences and follow the instructions."

However, if you want to share your reviews you can post them on your site, html will be generated for you so you can copy and paste the reviews. If you scroll down on the side bar you will see and example.

Traffic - Traffic Falling? No Traffic:

Check out Google Trends, you can learn about the trend of your market. Becasue I am a Home Based Jeweler I checked http://www.google.com/trends?q=handcrafted+jewelry. In an effort to promote traffic and sales of Handcrafted Jewelry on http:homebasedjewelers.blogspot.com I checked the "trend" of handcrafted jewelry and this is what I found:



Google states: "Trends scales the first term you’ve entered so that its average search traffic in the chosen time period is 1.0; subsequent terms are then scaled relative to the first term. Note that all numbers are relative to total traffic."

Checking Jewelry the trend shows:



basically the same trend.

People get so frustrated becasue they don't get enough traffic and I ask, how may of the same people really work at "getting traffic". Are you using the tremendous tools that are available at no charge. SEO's charge big bucks to "guarantee" top listings and what tools do you think they may be using?

Go to http://www.google.com/trends to check out what your market looks like.

To tweet or not to tweet?

Twitter:
To tweet or not to tweet?
How do you tell who is worth following though once you've found them?
How much time out of your ‘no time left’ day do you have to tweet?
How do you know the person you are following is even who they claim to be?

If you find someone with 2500 followers, you might think they have something of value; but do they?
Spammers are hitting Twitter like the plague. Twitter has started to verify account because of a lawsuit. Almost everything I read about marketing says you MUST be on the social network and yet I have not seen much that interests me because idle chit-chat is a waste of my time. In addition to all the nonsense that is going on in Twitter.

By Mike McDonald
“Social Media is still an area very much in it's development. There will no doubt be plenty of twists and turns as we move along. However, there is one thing you can absolutely take to the bank: if aren't in it, you need to get there. For better or worse, "wait and see" strategists have no place in this world.” (Mike has been covering ebusiness and the search industry for WebProNews since 2000.)

Somebody please tell me why I Must! The “authority” (?) that be tell us we must right after they tell us it’s not a good place to be. Go figure. Yep, and they will probably come with search engines for tweeters too.

What is the difference between Bird Flu and Swine Flu?
For bird flu you need tweetment
And for swine flu you need oikment.

Link Referral

The Linkreferral Concept (from Linkreferral website)
We (linkreferral.com) are striving to provide an affordable alternative to search engines and banner ad campaigns which give sometimes slow results. Our four pronged approach to developing free traffic for our members is described below:


Members directory traffic - By joining, you will be included in our members directory which is visited by our community of over 200,000 members, and thousands of outside visitors on a daily basis. You'll have the opportunity to earn a ranking at the top of your category, absolutely free! Receive valuable feedback from visitors of your website, network with your peers, and give your opinion on other websites in the directory. The more you participate, the more you get in return!

Referral based traffic - You are probably familiar with the concept of network marketing, well this is a free version of that marketing method - by registering and promoting your linkreferral affiliate link, an exponential growth of 5 levels of referrals can be created (ex. you refer 10 people who refer 10 people each who refer 10 each....), potentially 10,000s of visitors/day all viewing your link prominently in the top spot of our 'Featured Sites' section on our home page for your referral ID. It works because its free, fast to register, easy to implement and no risk. People that are referred from your site will have nothing to lose and everything to gain, just like you.

Search engine traffic - By registering, you'll benefit several ways, including,

1) having your web page listing indexed more quickly - the major search engines continuously spider our site, and the sites listed in our directory.
2) Improved search engine rankings and SEO optimization.
3) Indirect search engine traffic via linkreferral.com. Pages such as your directory listing and your affiliate page listing feature your link and description, are picked up by all the major search engines. Your sign-up description, combined with our strong traffic base (a prime ranking factor for most major search engines) can pull in a significant immediate steady stream of traffic to your listing on linkreferral.com and then on to your web site.

Simple Things: Html

Below are simple things that can help you control the look of your posting in your blog. By typing these into the code you can, for example, put a widget in the center of a column. The picture below illustrates what the characters look like but can’t be typed here because it won’t show up. Put the first character set before your text or widget and the second set directly after.

The br is for a break in a line. It creates a new line.

Strong means the text will be bold.

Strike means there will be a strike through a word.
As in the price was 49.95 Now 39.95. There is a character set of html before and after the 49.95 that you don't see.

Straight from Blogger Buzz!

Third Party Templates for Blogger

BTemplates.
A free directory of user-submitted templates, classified by type and/or features.

The Cutest Blog on the Block
Run by Becky and Ashley of 2 Moms Talk, this site offers free, premade layouts, as well as customizable backgrounds.

Blogger Styles
Gallery of submitted templates, ranked by visitors and includes detailed configuration instructions.

FalconHive
Conversions of WordPress templates upon request, along with archive of past conversions.

All Blogspot Templates
Templates in 1-, 2- and 3-column options. Also includes AdSense-ready templates.

Zona Cerebral
Spanish site with dozens of templates to choose from, including several converted WordPress themes.

Quite Random
A number of free templates, and several Blogger-specific tutorials regarding setup and layout editing.

ChicaBlogger
In Spanish, templates designed primarily for women.

Deluxe Templates
Hundreds of templates, including many converted WordPress themes. Also has a nice "tips & tricks" section for customizing Blogger.

Pyzam
Thousands of templates, browsable by category and sortable by recency or popularity.

Our Blog Templates
160+ free templates, all well-labeled for easy browsing to find the one you want.

eBlogTemplates
Combination of free and premium templates, and a wealth of tips for tweaking your Blogger blog.

You must understand blogger.com does not provide support for third party templates. When I imported the template for Wear My Blues I had great insturction from the website eBlogTemplates.

I also started with a blank Blog, I did not move anything. The entire setup was a breeze!