March :: 2011 :: Creative Juices Graphic Design Studio

Archive for March 2011

What is a Favicon and Why Do I Need It?

“Favicon” is short for favorites icon. It is the tiny little image you see right next to your domain name in the browser’s title bar and bookmark.

Creating a Favicon is easy, sort of

All you need to do is create a 16 x 16 pixel .ico file. Start off in Photoshop or any image editing program. Use your logo or brand image and create a mini jpg file.

Then can go to a site like favicon and upload your jpg image.

Convert your jpg into an ico

Once you upload your new jpg icon into a favicon generator site, you just have to name it favicon.ico and export that ico image to your hard drive. Then, using FTP or Dreamweaver just place that image into your site’s root folder.

Even easier if you use WordPress

If you’re using WordPress, the “Shockingly Simple Favicon Options” plugin is an easy way to set up your favicon.

If you don’t use WordPress, check out Dynamic Drive’s Favicon Generator or Free Favicon Generator from Website Planet.

Adding a favicon to your website is a great way to help build your image or brand. It also makes your site look a little more professional.

03 Mar

You Will Lose Your Data Unless You Backup

Hard drives crash and burn

It’s inevitable. You will lose all your data unless you regularly backup.

It’s happened to me. There I was, sitting at my computer when whoosh, the hard drive crashed. On my iMac. Can you believe it?

You think restarting will fix the problem. Sometimes it does. This time it didn’t. The only recourse was to spend hundreds of dollars to try and recover the data. And buy a new hard drive.

There are many backup options.

Since then I take every precaution to back up all my data.

Every project I work on I store in a folder I named “backup”. Clever and informative. Whenever I have chunk of time free I regularly back up all this data onto DVDs and then file them away.
I have a 1TB external hard drive. Being a Mac person I use Time Machine. I set this up to run a backup every hour. It’s come in handy a few times to rescue lost files.
I subscribe to Carbonite. It’s an online, off-site storage company, for both Macs and PCs. There are other options, but Carbonite has a free iPhone app where you can access all your online files. It regularly backs up all the data on my hard drive and stores it offline. Then if something happens to my home, external hard drive and backup DVDs, I’m covered. They do have earthquakes in California, you know.
I also subscribe to MobileMe. Big changes are coming soon, I hear. I use this service to backup my QuickBooks for Mac and Quicken.
I also use MobileMe to backup my home data, contacts, calendar and mail.
My music and photos are also backed up online, through Time Machine, on DVDs, Carbonite, iPhone and iPad.
I use Todo to store all my todos online with the Appigo sync service. I’ve also got all my todos on my iPhone and iPad using the Todo app. If only I would do my todos I wouldn’t need to store them.
I bought 1Password for my iPhone, iPad and Mac. This stores all my passwords and sensitive info. It’s a great program that asks you if you want to store login info whenever you log into something online.

Am I paranoid about losing my data? You bet. It’s happened. And it’s not unusual.

I highly recommend you look into some form of data backup. Better to be safe than regret losing data or memories permanently.

Also check out How to Backup Your Data & Installation Discs from Gigaom’s Apple Blog.

Have you got backup horror stories? Share them here.

Free Marketing Tips

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01 Mar

Tips to Optimize Videos for Search Engines

Guest Post by Cayley Vos, Netpaths.net

This video outlines the process of optimizing rich media for the web. By performing keyword research and analyzing competitors you can understand how to position your videos online to get improved placement and increased traffic.

Using the advanced allintitle: search query will reveal the true numbers of competitors in your niche and give you a benchmark to evaluate the challenges in ranking videos for these keywords. Understanding the keywords people use to search for information will allow you to unlock the spigot of search engine traffic and provide the conversion funnel to dramatically increase sales.

Videos have a 30% higher clickthrough rate in the search engine results pages, so having videos rank for competitive keywords gives you a huge advantage over competitors with standard blue text links.

Video is created by Creative Juices partner Netpaths.net who collaborate on online projects to help bring you targeted visitors and increased leads.