Posts Tagged ‘Add new tag’

Wedding Photography Tips

Aug 1, 2008 Photography

Question to ask

  1. What is your photographic style?

    This can be one or more of the following: traditional, photojournalistic, posed, candid, artistic, documentary.

    My answer…

  2. Are you the actual day-of photographer?

    If not, can we meet with the actual photographer? Should/Can you meet the assistants also? Some wedding photographers will sell you on them and send someone else to cover your wedding.

  3. Do you shoot in black and white?

    If film, do they shoot in black and white? If digital, do they keep the orignals in color and do black and white in post-production? See this article on black and white digital photography.

  4. What is your experience with wedding photography?

    How many weddings? How many years? Have you shot at our location? If so, what are the special photographic conditions of our location? Have you done a wedding similar to our size?

  5. Will you have other weddings that weekend?

    How will that affect our wedding? If you at the tail end of a weekend (Sunday after Saturday and Friday weddings), can your photographer handle that? Some photographers do not have the physical or emotional endurance.

  6. Can we get negatives or digital negatives?

    How long after the wedding date (get this one in print)? Are they full resolution files?

  7. What kind of equipment do you use?

    Are there tripods? Wires? Can people trip? Is it obtrusive? Ask about the quality of the cameras, lenses, and lighting. This is to just roughly gauge their understanding of equipment. I can deconstruct most of my own photographs, telling you the light settings and lens I used.

  8. Are you insured?

    This is just a measure of their professionalism as a business.

  9. What do you do in case of emergencies?

    What if the photographer is ill or cannot make it? Do you have backup equipment? Do you backup photos (for digital photographers)?

  10. Can I see an entire wedding?

    This allows you to see the consistancy in one day (as opposed to only having a few “keepers” from each wedding).

  11. How much is overtime?

    Can they work overtime if asked to?

  12. How are you dressed?

    Are they presentable. I’ve seen photographers show up in gray t-shirts and black lace tank-tops (not guys).

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What Does Your Web Design Do For You

Jul 31, 2008 Web Design

There are so many websites on the internet nowadays, so if you want a great website that stands out from the crowd, you are going to have to have brilliant web design incorporated into it.

A website that is badly designed will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. If you want a website that is remembered for the right reasons, you are going to have to have a design that makes your website unique.

Your web design is the first thing that people notice when they arrive at your website. If you have an untidy website with bad graphics and terrible navigation, you are going to lose your readers and viewers right from the start. That is why web design is important in the process of creating a successful website. Whether it is a personal website or one that you intend to use for business purposes, it needs to be well designed and well maintained.

If you can grab the reader’s attention by graphics that are relevant and useful, text that is of a very high quality, colors and layouts that are easy on the eye, then you are half way there! Research has shown that more people buy from websites that are designed professionally and look trustworthy, rather than quickly made and with badly thought out designs.

So, you can see how important your web design really is now. There are many ways to improve your web design, both for free and by hiring someone else to do it for you. Which you choose will depend on your budget and your time frame. A busy web designer may not be able to fit you in for months.

How you layout your website is also very important. You may have lots of great content on your website that people would love to read, but what if they can’t find it? If you haven’t clearly and easily laid out your website in the web design process, your readers won’t be able to find any other pages. This could be disastrous if you are selling some kind of service or product.

All in all the web design aspect is only a small part of getting your website up and running, however, it is very important. When you are designing your website, remember to make it easy to navigate, concise and clear.

If you are not familiar with web design and all the aspects that go into creating a website, it may be worth your while looking for a professional web designer or a pre made template. Web designers come with different price tags all depending on where you get them from and what you need doing.

If you want a relatively simple design you will be looking at a fairly cheap price. If you are looking for a complex website with many features you can expect to pay a fair amount of money for it. A good designer will include you all throughout the process. You will be able to approve the website as many times as required.

Ready-made templates are great if you don’t have the budget for a professional designer and don’t have the time to learn how to create one from scratch. There are many free ones that you find on the Internet or ones that you can buy for a small amount of money.

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Italics – When you should use them

Jul 31, 2008 SEO

The purpose of italic typefaces is to aid comprehension by separating off certain words and phrases from their surrounding text. But when exactly should you use italics?

The basic purpose in typesetting a story or article for a book, newspaper or periodical, for print or online, is to enhance understanding of the text and thereby make the reading an easy, pleasant experience.

Roman type is the straightforward, upright type we read everyday in our newspapers, magazines and books, and on our monitors.

Italic is the ‘handwriting’ equivalent of whatever roman font we are reading. It has a sloping cursive quality that reminds us of the manual writing we learned in primary school.

Bold type is roman or italic font that has been emphasized by thickening and making it darker than the surrounding text.

The question is: when should we use which version of a particular typeface – roman, italic, or bold? The answer must focus on the reader’s needs and the reading experience.

It is obvious that for most copy the roman version of the chosen font should be used. This is because, having an upright face, it is the easiest to read and it is what readers expect.

Because the bold version of a font makes text stand out strongly, it is used for highlighting important words, phrases and sections. Thus headlines, decks and subheads set in bold will, along with pull-quotes and other tricks of the typesetter’s art, provide the casual scanner with clues as to what your article or story is all about. The judicious use of bold in this way will induce him or her to read the main story.

Bold however is too strong to be used, except very occasionally, within body text. To set off words from surrounding text is the main function of italics.

So when should you use italics exactly? Here’s a sort of check-list, a mixture of accepted practice and my personal opinion.

Most of these when-to-use-italics rules apply equally to words in body copy, head-lines and captions, and whether you are typesetting books, articles, stories or web-pages.

[1] The names of ships and aircraft; eg: The Caribbean Cruiser sank yesterday. This is the oldest when-to-use-italics rule. It allows the reader to quickly grasp what is being referred to in the message.

[2] The titles of poems; eg: As You Go Dancing by James Stewart is famous among the literati of the Arabian Gulf. This is another very traditional use of italics that enables quick reader-uptake.

[3] Foreign words; eg: We turned left and found ourselves in a cul de sac. Another very traditional use of italics that makes for quicker reading.

[4] The titles of books, newspapers, articles and stories occurring within a sentence without further explanation; eg: The Saturday edition of the Limerick Leader was always on the streets by Friday afternoon.

However titles that appear within larger works are not italicized but are set off in quotation marks; eg: ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ in the Irish Times is sometimes interesting.

[5] Latin phrases used to classify living things; eg: Many people wonder why mankind is referred to as homo sapiens. Another use of italics that has been around ab aeterno.

[6] Where a word is used as an example rather than for its meaning; eg: The word Kennedy is a proper noun. This is neater than setting the noun within single quotes as in: The word ‘Kennedy’ is a proper noun.

[7] For introducing new terms; eg: In Freudian psychology reference is made to the ego, the super-ego, and the id. This is a neat solution to highlighting words that will probably be explained later.

[8] For the subjects of definitions; eg: An odd number is any number that cannot be divided by two. This is useful for the reader as, should he or she wish to refer back to the definition later, a word in italics among a sea of roman letters is easy to find.

[9] For mathematical symbols: eg: The standard acceleration of gravity g is 9.81183 metres per second per second. The symbol does not need to be surrounded by commas or single quotes which would be required if it were set in roman type.

[10] For emphasis; eg: Janice wasn’t the only girl at the party. The use of italics for emphasis is less intrusive than bold and more subtly suggestive.

[11] To indicate a character’s internal reflections in stories; eg: This just does not seem right, Janice thought. However many writers prefer other ways of expressing inner thoughts.

[12] Using a letter or number as a noun; eg: He was vexed because they had left out the d in his name. However many writers would prefer to put a letter or number used in this way between quotes: eg; He was vexed because they had left out the ‘d’ in his name.

That’s about it for the when-to-use italics rules. Except, what should you do if you need to use italics within italics?

If some word or phrase that should be italicised is already within a run of italics, the trick is to switch back to roman type for that word or phrase; eg: I’m in a really weird situation, Janice thought.

This italics-within-italics solution works best when italics are used to highlight internal reflections; eg: Why can’t we just look up Wikipedia for the answer? he wondered to himself.

Of course, you don’t have to follow these when-to-use-italics rules. However most of them are in current use because they do aid reader comprehension.

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Ten SEO Mistakes Made on Database Driven Websites

Jul 31, 2008 SEO

Search engine friendly websites is one of those often heard phrases, both from web site development companies and from their clients. Everyone knows that this is important to have, and yet it is one of the things that is actually often overlooked.

Search engine optimisation companies actually spend a lot of their time analysing a website and removing barriers to the search engines ranking a site highly. At the web development level, it is possible to build a site that is perfectly search engine friendly. One of the hardest types of sites to get right though are database driven websites. Listed below are ten of the most common issues that are created, often unknowingly, in the development process of a dynamically generated web site.

1. Pages with duplicate content – not enough differential areas within the pages, so that only small areas of the page change from page to page. It is essential that enough of the page text changes for the search engines to see an appreciable difference between one page and the next.

2. Pages with duplicate page titles – the page title is a great indicator to the search engines of the primary content of the page. Whilst this is often unique on sites such as e-commerce websites, it is often overlooked in other sites, particularly where small areas of the site are generated from a database, such as news pages.

3. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions – again, this is easy to overlook and set a global or category level meta description. These give the search engines a reason to penalise your site for not giving them enough information, and again, creating a unique meta description for every page is an essential SEO task.

4. Using auto-generation of pages as a shortcut instead of creating good content. This is linked quite closely to point 1, where it is possible to create pages that have only a tiny percentage difference between them. Databases are fantastic ways of storing information, but you still need to put the work in to fill them with content. Unique information about the subject of the page will immensely help both the long tail and the ability of the search engines to determine that a page is valuable.

5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links – potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.

6. Too many query strings – this is a common bugbear of the professional SEO, where complicated database selections create deep levels of pages, but with seven or eight &id= type strings. Additionally, some bad development methodology can leave pages with null query strings that appear in every URL but don’t do anything. The answer to this is generally URL rewrites, creating much more search engine friendly and user-friendly URLs!

7. Putting query strings in different orders when accessed through different places – this can create duplicate content issues, which can cause major penalties.

8. Not using user language to generate automated pages – if you are going to create a database driven website that uses words in the query strings (or better in rewritten URLs) make sure that you use words that will help you with SEO – if you sell widgets, make sure you are using the word widgets somewhere in the URL instead of just product= or id= – keyword research can assist with this.

9. Not allowing the meta data and title to be edited easily after the site build. It is possible to hardcode the generation of meta information into a database that doesn’t allow it to be edited later. Creating a mechanism for modifying this information initially helps everyone at a later stage when the information needs changing without shoehorning it into an already developed structure.

10. Creating keyword stuffed pages by using auto-generation. Once upon a time, search engines quite liked pages with high densities of your keywords, but now these are likely to get you marked down rather than up. So be aware when creating pages that long pages with lots of your products on can create too high a density. For instance listing blue widgets, light blue widgets, navy blue widgets, sky blue widgets is going to create a page with a very dense page for the phrase “blue widgets”.

These are just 10 of the most common potential optimisation pitfalls when creating dynamic websites. There are many more facets to producing a great database driven site, including user friendliness, speed, performance and security, but they all add together to make the best solution to your needs.

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