I’m updating my web site, its been a long time coming! In this update I’m doing away with the old portfolio and going with a more updated way to manage it. All items will be featured on the blog area of my site rather than a hard to update portfolio page.

Here are some older logo designs that date back pre-2008 that I wanted to keep in my online digital portfolio.

Not see what you are looking for? These are a small sample of the many many logos and designs I’ve done, ask for more examples if you have something specific in mind!

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You may have noticed, or not, that there is a floaty box in the upper right corner of the Web Savvy Mama blog now. This is the status window for the Facebook Connect plugin I’m trying out on this blog. What is Facebook Connect? Its a plugin that you can add to your wordpress blog to allow your readers to login and comment using their Facebook profiles. Not only with they use the same login, but their avatar will be the one from their Facebook profile as well.

The good part is that if you use Facebook as a marketing tool and login as your business, it can be a great way to promote. It also keeps the various logins to a minimum and makes it easier for your readers to post.

The bad part is that, so far, I haven’t found a way to implement a nickname instead of displaying your full name as it does on Facebook. Crossing my fingers that they fix that in a future release.

Brave enough to post from your Facebook? Give it a try and let me know what you think!

You want a web site, but don’t know where to start? Let me see if I can help. This blog article is dedicated to my dad who called me today and said “Kris, I need a web site.” This got me thinking that I really need to put out an official article on what to do to get started. So here is my step by step guide to help point you in the right direction to start your web site project. Hopefully this will help answer some of your questions.

1. Decide what kind of web site you want.

- Is your site strictly informational? This would be a online portfolio or business card. Somewhere for web users to find you and get information on your services and how to contact you.
- Is your site a blog or user interactive site? This means that you have information that is updated regularly and your visitors can interact with your site through comments or subscribing to your news feed.
- Is your site an ecommerce site? You sell products or services directly from your web site. You will most likely need a cart to process orders and maintain stock.

2. Research your market’s internet presence.

- What do others in your field or market have for web sites?
- What information is available on them?
- When looking at other sites what is the general feel and do you want your site to follow market standards or do you want a different feel?

3. Find your designer/web developer.

- If you are not proficient in web coding, I highly suggest hiring a designer. They will help walk you through these steps and tell you what you need for the different features you may want on your site. Oh, and just in case you didn’t already realize it… Web Savvy Mama is a web designer. Hi there, nice to meet you. You can fill out a quote request on my contact page for more information.

4. Get your domain and hosting.

- I recommend finding the designer first because the designer may have certain hosts they recommend or if you need a cart can tell you what hosts are compatible. Sometimes carts come with hosting plans.
- Your domain is the address for your web site. Its your dot.com. Hosting is your space. Think of these as your house is the hosting where you live, but your address (domain) is the address where you receive your mail and tells people where your house is. Domains run around $10 a year and hosting runs anywhere from $3 a month and more. Your designer can tell you what type of plan you will need.

5. The design process.

-You know what you want and have the physical space for it on the web. Now the designing part begins. Depending on your designer these steps may vary, I’ll list the order in which Web Savvy Mama does them.
- Logo, first the logo is worked on and approved by the client. The look of the site is based on this logo so its a pretty integral part of the process.
- Mockup, before you get too far in you’ll want to make sure the designer and client are on the same page for design (look) of the site. Therefore a full scale visual mockup is done that represents how the site will look. This is the longest phase when working with Web Savvy Mama. I want to make sure you have a great representation of what your site will look like and make any changes necessary before we start coding.
- After the mockup is approved the coding begins. This is when the designer actually codes the website so that it looks like the graphical mockup. Graphics are created and functionality is given. The site is coming to life.
- The site is installed. Once the coding is done the pages or template are loaded to the site (or cart/blog).
- From here the client is able to start loading content or if additional services have been purchased, Web Savvy Mama does this.

Your site is done, now what? Read on for tips on web site promoting and getting traffic!

Having been a web designer for 6 years and working with small businesses for over 7 years, I’ve heard this a lot. “I have my web site, how do I get traffic and sales?” A lot of people think that once you have a web site, that’s it, work done. Nope! It is a never ending process to keep your site listed properly and make sure your potential clients can find you. Even more important, turn your visits into sales! Don’t have a site yet? Start here: I want a web site!

First of all, there are a few things that should be done even before you get to this point that I will touch on briefly.

1. Have a professional looking web site. Make sure your graphics look nice, your colors all flow, your coding is clean and you have good navigation and content. This first step is the most important step to keep visitors on your site. Web Design Rules According to Web Savvy Mama.

2. Know your market. You should already have browsed the web and found out who your direct competition is. What is working for them? What can you do to set yourself apart from them? Don’t rely on cheaper prices to get you a sale, this only works for physical products with professional looking websites. If you sell digital materials or a service, you are going to have to solely rely on word of mouth, portfolio and the impression your website gives. Why? You get what you pay for. While your cheaper item/service might be just as great as a competitors, potential customers may not look at it that way. Be competitive in pricing, don’t low ball your worth. Also know what your customers are wanting, not just what you want to give them. How can you convince them you have what they need?

Now on to the nitty gritty. You have a web site, you’ve done your research, now what?

1. Work on your SEO! Search Engine Optimization is super important. I’d say that the majority of my clients have found me through Google. This means you have to know what your keywords and phrases are and how to promote yourself in the search engines. It is such a big topic that I can’t get into it here, but I did write an article in 2007 that still has a lot of good information in it to get you started. Web Site Optimization, SEO.

2. Advertising, how and where. This falls back on knowing your target market. For me, mine is small business and specifically work at home parents. I first researched where those people tend to hang out on the web and focused my advertising there. For some this may be a large web forum or web site. Find out what it takes to do various advertising on those sites. Signature links on forums have worked well for me in the past. Again, keep in mind the keywords you want to benefit from the SEO! You can also try Google adsense but unless you have a larger budget or very specialized keywords, chances are its not going to be much bang for your buck. Participate in popular blog giveaways, get featured on other web sites and get friends to talk about you. Word of mouth advertising is the best advertising! Do Facebook and Twitter help? Most likely not, unless you already have a big following on your personal accounts and can piggy back from there. You can use these social network sites to help with SEO though!

3. Get a blog! This goes back, again, to SEO. It also generates something that visitors may want to come back to read and gets them onto your site again. I’ve written about this as well so read more at Add a blog? Yes Please!

You have the traffic, lets turn those visitors into sales!

1. Have a product that will sell!
2. Professional site with a cart.
3. Competitive prices.
4. No dead links!
5. Clear navigation.
6. Your visitors need to be very clear on what you are selling.
7. Clear form of contact method. They need to know they can reach you.
8. Offer something that no one else has. (Product, service, atmosphere, this could be anything!)

Just a few sites and logos that I worked on over the winter. More will be added for the spring ones soon.

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Check them out! dessandj Wrap a Bye Baby Lindsay Lane More to come!

If you like Photography or graphic editing and use a Mac computer (like me) you may have heard of Apple’s program called Aperture. This program is based on iPhoto that is included on all newer Apple computers. My husband and I both enjoy photography and have been exploring more into the post production editing of the photos we take. This led us to try out Aperture.

Aperture is a nice program and highly revered in the photography world. It makes editing easy and is especially helpful if you enjoy editing RAW photo formats. The photo editing options are endless and too many for me to get into. Taking a simple self photo with my photo booth on my iMac I played around with some of the presets and got a feel for how this would work for amateur person jumping in. Having used Photoshop and Pixelmator the Aperture layout is very different, as well as the workflow. You shouldn’t let this detour you though, it is very easy to navigate. I did have some confusion on how to actually save a project once I was done with my edits, I did manage to discover the export feature which is not very straight forward. I have to say that I find this a great tool for photo editing and does a lot, but I would not say it is a standalone program. I think you’d still want another heftier program like Photoshop to really polish your work.

My husband and I both discovered one major flaw, freezing. We’ve been testing this software on 21.5″ iMac computers that are pretty new (new in Feb 2010). We found that Aperture will spontaneously freeze during a workflow and require a system reboot to allow the computer to work again. I’m a huge Mac fan and have NEVER had any issues with freezing, even when running Parallels and dual operating systems with a gazillion programs. This is my third Mac computer and I can attest to the reliability of the system. So these sudden freezes in Aperture are highly frustrating. We’d expect this from a Microsoft product, not an Apple product. Tsk tsk. A quick search on Google confirms that this is not a issue that only we are having.

So overall, this program has the potential for greatness, but falls short on reliability. We’ll try it again once Apple takes care of the stability issues. Want to try it out for yourself? Check out the 30 day trial at Apple.

Don’t want to take my word for it? Check out this PCWorld review that addresses the Aperture freezing issues.

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