$15 iTunes Gift Card Giveaway
As I mentioned last week on Facebook, Web Savvy Mama is having another gift card giveaway! This time the lucky winner will receive a $15 iTunes gift card! Use the gift cart to buy music, ebooks, apps or gift it to the hard to shop for person in your life!
So what do you have to do to qualify to win?
Here is the lowdown on the giveaway:
1. “Like” Web Savvy Mama on Facebook.
2. That was it. Easy enough eh?
Want more chances at winning? Here’s how to increase your odds! 1 additional entry per item!
* Leave a RELEVANT comment on any of my other blog posts (please comment back here with link to post)
* Follow me on twitter at @websavvymama
* Blog this giveaway
* Post about this giveaway on Facebook, please leave a comment with the URL to where you posted.
* Tweet this giveaway: I entered to win a $15 iTunes giftcard at @websavvymama http://bit.ly/wsmitunes (1x per 24 hrs )
The fine print: Contest ends October 31st 2010 at 11:59 pm. Winner will be drawn randomly from all eligible entries on November 1st 2010. Winners will be notified via Facebook with information on how to claim their prize. Winner will have 72 hours to respond with appropriate information. If winner fails to respond, a new winner will be chosen.
Oh, did I mention that becoming a fan of Web Savvy Mama on Facebook automatically enters you into future contests?! How awesome is that?
A sneak peak into the other side of WSM.
The clients I’ve had for years probably already know my history of how I became a web designer, my love of all things artistic, that I’m a mom of 3 kids and have been married for over 10 years (together for 15, can you believe that?). What most of my clients and blog readers don’t know, is that I have a personal site that I also use as a sort of “cover-it-all” business card so to speak.
Just recently I decided that it needed a face lift. I designed the site back when I was in school for design, so it was a bit dated. As the story with most designers, we do everyone else’s sites first and often neglect our own! I decided that I needed to just jump in and do it and stop procrastinating!
Well, the new site is ready for everyone to see! I decided that if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it different! I broke every rule that I have for web design and decided to stop thinking rationally with this one. I told myself I’d never create a horizontal site; well I guess its true, you can never say never. When you visit the site, you’ll see what I mean. Most will either love it or hate it, and my feelings will not be hurt if its just not your style. Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think!
Spyder3 Monitor Calibration Tool
So I’ve waited far too long to get around to playing with a calibration tool for my monitor. I finally bit the bullet and decided it was time. While at a local camera and photography store I noticed they carried display calibrators so I decided the Sypder3 Pro was destined for use in my home office.
A display color calibrator reads your monitor and sets up a profile to adjust your settings so that you see the truest colors possible. This is important if you do a lot of photography or graphic design, you want to make sure the colors you see and design for are what the final printed product will look like. Of course, there are always fine differences in printers as well, but at least this helps get is closer. If two people look at the same image on different uncalibrated computers, they may see very different colors! Your purple-ish may be my blue-ish. Contrast plays a part here too. I’m sure you can imagine the frustration when a designer and client are having trouble agreeing on a color pallet because they are seeing 2 completely different colors! The problem only compounds further for photographers, for whom color editing can make or break a shot. Spending a good amount of time on a photograph only to find out after its received back from the printer that your colors are off can drive even the most patient artist to madness. Calibrators are supposed to help alleviate some of that stress.
Read More…
Basic Photo Editing with Aperture 3
Here is a quick video tutorial on how to use Aperture 3 to do some photo editing. Aperture 3 is software designed for Mac computers and does a beautiful job editing photos. In this tutorial I go through some of the basic steps to edit a photograph to make it look more clean and professional. Don’t have Aperture or would like me to do your photo editing? Use my contact page to request a quote for my services.
Want to see this video in High Definition? Go to YouTube directly for more Web Savvy Mama tutorial videos featured in HD.
See the finished photo and others at Nate Paul Images, my husband’s online photo gallery where he and I display some of our favorites!
New Photography Site
My husband has been doing photography for a bit now and finally asked me to create a website for his photos. I spent the weekend finishing the setup and loading a sample of his photos.
What does this mean for my web design clients? Custom stock photography! We will be slowly building a large collection of images that can be used for stock photography for everything from web sites to advertising. Our goal will be to offer stock photos that will be of use to WAHMs and other small businesses for a reason price, with out needing to buy large amounts of credits to do so!
Eventually we may decide to expand this to product photography to go along with my graphic editing services. You’ll be able to have Web Savvy Mama not only design your website but supply the images to go along with your products! Of course, this is still a bit in the future, but the white box I made my husband build is just itching for use!
In the meanwhile, what would you like to see pictures of?
SEO Services from WSM
A while back I posted that I don’t offer SEO, the reason behind that I feel Search Engine Optimization is a long term relationship between the site owner and the web site. SEO is a process that not only includes the basic set up, but also the continual attention of the site owner. Its not something you can just “do” as a one time thing and forget about. With that said, I’m getting a lot of requests to help with SEO type services. I’ve decided its time to make these services available for those who need a bit more help getting started.
What I’ve decided to offer are starter services that will jump start the SEO process for the web site. I still encourage site owners to learn more about how to optimize their site and work towards reinforcing the optimization with long term efforts. In the Add Ons – A la Carte category of my online ordering area I’ve added some basic SEO services to help get you started.
Some of the services listed include adding meta tags or pages and products, keyword research, full product optimization, site map creation and submission, search engine submission, Analytics creation and integration, social networking setup and integration (including Twitter and Facebook) as well as various WordPress social networking plugin setups.
A few of these are offered as stand alone add ons and the rest are part of the SEO services customized package where you can pick and choose which services to add.
All SEO services are for sites and blogs designed by me, Web Savvy Mama. If you have a site designed by someone else please contact me using my custom quote form to inquire about the cost for your SEO package.