Yearly Calendar – The creation process

The first step?

Last year, my pro-bono client, PuRR Project, asked me to design a calendar to sell for the benefit of raising dollars for the cats & the no-kill shelter they so wonderfully run. I had never done a calendar before but I am a designer after all ain’t I? So I can do anything…. I just hadn’t realized just how much work this would entail. What I thought would take me 2 weeks quickly turned into a 2 month project. Given, I am a perfectionist but aren’t all designers?

So first we had a meeting to decide on the format; Will it be folded? Will it be individual pages with a spiral? What is the finished size after cutting? etc… I say this because obviously, you need to know what space you will have to work with, how large your picture will be, in what format (vertical or horizontal), will there be text (in this case there had to be to tell the story of each month’s cat, are the date small or in larger squares to allow for notes? etc…
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What is hacking and why you need to keep your computer and websites clean

As you’ve maybe read in my previous post about the latest Worldwide Brute Force attack on WordPress started on April 11th, 2013 and still ongoing to this day, you may now know that hacking is not limited to attacking companies or specific individuals. If that’s what you thought in the past, it’s about time you learned some facts about hacking.

It’s widely believed that viruses only aim to destroy the data on your computer or worse yet corrupt it or delete it. That is a fallacy of great proportions and a very dangerous one.

Allow me to open a window for you into what real hackers really do, how they do it and why.

First, all hackers hack for different reasons; some hack for the hell of it, some for profit, some to get even or hurt someone, a company or government they are against, but many hack to get in to your system and control it for when they’ll need it later for a bigger attack on a bigger fish. This is the one I want to bring your attention to because this is how this latest attack is happening, through hundreds of thousands of individual machines all over the world.

The aim is to hack into enough WordPress installations (those mainly still using admin as username – which is a terrible practice – and common passwords) and gain administrator privileges to run operations from behind the installation of your WordPress website and finally gain control of the hosting to create yet an even bigger botnet of such power that it can bring the internet world to a screeching halt all over the world at once. Did I confuse you?

Ok, let’s start from the beginning…
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Brute Force Hacking of WordPress

Anyone who has any clue about building websites & providing good SEO will tell you that content is king… I agree. They will also tell you that GOOD content is primordial, also true.

I don’t blog very often because mostly, I’m too busy building great sites for my clients and two, I don’t blog for the sake of blogging. If I have something that I believe is of true interest, then I post.

This is one such occasion. Big news hit the internet on April 12th, 2013, at least for those following current events that matter to web developers & their clients.
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SEO Step by Step – Part 5

Measuring Success

SEO can take a lot of time and effort. What good is spending all this time and effort if you can’t see the fruits of your labor? There are many metrics you can track on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to keep your SEO plan on track and measure your success.
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SEO Step by Step – Part 4

Identifying Keywords

₪ How to Identify Long-Tail Keywords?

As discussed in the Long-Tail Concept & Theory section of this blog series, the key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords. Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic head terms, they are associated with more qualified traffic and users that are most likely further down their path of intent. The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process.
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SEO Step by Step – Part 3

Off-Page SEO

Compared to on-page SEO, off-page SEO can certainly be more difficult to execute. Off-page SEO entails building relationships with other websites through the creation of attractive content, or reaching out to the people who run the websites. This process of building relationships is called link building. Who is linking to you, how they are linking to you, and how your content is shared in social networks and across the web are all factors that can have a significant impact on your ability to rank on the SERP.
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SEO Step by Step – Part 2

On-Page SEO

There are multiple elements on your website that you can control to make it easy for the search engines to index your content and understand what it is all about. Here’s what we’ll cover in Part 2 – On-Page SEO:

• Website Content
• URL Structure
• Pictures
• Title Tags & Meta Tags
• Headline Tags
• Internal Linking

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SEO Step by Step – Part 1

As promised and by popular demand, we will now cover just about all you need to know about SEO. Because the subject is very intensive, we will divide it in various parts as follows:

• Part 1: Introduction to SEO
• Part 2: On-Page SEO
• Part 3: Off-Page SEO
• Part 4: Identifying Keywords
• Part 5: Measuring Success

Part 1 – this post – will cover the following topics:

• What is SEO?
• Google Replaces the Phone Book
• How Search Engines Work
• What it Takes to Rank
• Long-Tail Concept & Theory
• Content is King
• How to Approach Your SEO Strategy

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Top 10 Social Media Myths

Social Media is…

…for lonely people that don’t have a real life
…just a fab that will pass and disappear
…not going to bring in new clients or sales
…going to make me rich
…a waste of my time…

and I could go on. I’ve heard so many opinions on social media that I could compile it in a caricature book and probably make quite a bit of money as it would be quite funny to most.

But while there’s as many opinions out there as there are people, I thought it would be interesting to sort out the facts from the myths.
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Email Marketing done the right way!

Sadly, I receive,  almost daily, an array of email marketing  junk, much of which I didn’t ask for. I didn’t subscribe or give these people permission to send me mass emails, ever! Many of us find this upsetting after a while; having our business email accounts filled with worthless junk we didn’t ask for and having to sift through our mail to find the good and important stuff.
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