Web Media Answers

Caregiver Insights Foundation is a not for profit corporation located in Cortlandt Manor New York. Their mission is to inform and educate Alzheimer’s dementia caregivers through education videos.

I helped them to migrate from MobileMe to their own hosted website with embedded YouTube videos. Using WordPress as a base, I created a site that makes it easy to post, categorize, and find their video material. The site is also ready for language translation so it will appear in both English and Spanish once the Spanish translations have been completed.

Visit the site.

Filed under: web development by James_Fryer
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Slippery Pig Bike Shop in Phoenix, Arizona is a unique shop that had a generic website provided by SmartEtailing that was not accurately or effectively representing the shop. I was hired to create a site that conveyed the spirit of the shop as well display their actual product line.

Like so many pre-packaged website solutions’, SmartEtailing gave Slippery Pig a cookie cutter experience. And worse, the inventory on the website didn’t match the inventory in the store! I built a new website for them using WordPress that gives them their own identity and a product database to manage their distinct bicycle lines. Visit the site.

Filed under: web development by James_Fryer
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Larry Knapp’s new site is now complete and online. I worked with Larry to update the design of the site and convert it to WordPress to facilitate updates. Larry is a painter who uses strong vibrant colors to create large impactful images of nature. We stripped the site of its aesthetic flourishes to bring additional focus on the paintings.

The simplicity of the site design combined with the extra large images really focus the attention on the art and lets it shine.

Shifting to WordPress has made categorizing the work much easier and will greatly streamline and speed up the process of adding new work. The addition of some social networking tools should also help Larry extend his reach and find new art lovers.

Filed under: art, web development by James_Fryer
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I just completed a new website for a new artists’s live/work space: Oasis on Grand. I worked closely with Brittany Butler, the site manager, to create a website that would capture the spirit of the new apartment community. It was also a challenge to build in all functionality that this new venture would need to communicate all the goings on. This included sections for apartment and retail rental, publishing news about Oasis, and having an online gallery for the resident artists.

I really enjoyed working on such a different and unique project and Brittany was a blast to work with.

Filed under: art, web development by James_Fryer
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I recently completed a new website for Lauren Grunebaum: StarvingAtTheBanquet.com. Her site acts as an online brochure for her private psychotherapy practice in Manhattan. She treats children, adults, couples, and families with a range of emotional difficulties. These include: depression, anxiety, marital issues, parent-child conflicts, career difficulties, and coping with chronic illness.

We worked closely together to insure the site conveys the right tone and represents her in a professional manor. I also helped her setup a Facebook Page, and linked her blog together with her website to maximize her online exposure.

She has told me that she has already had many complements on the website design.

It was a pleasure working with her and wish her all the best!

Filed under: web development by James_Fryer
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If you are looking to create a new website or reinvent an existing but under performing website, the list below will help you focus on some important aspects and bring clarity to your site.

1. What is your business (be concise)?
2. What does your web site do for your business?
3. Who are your customers and how well do you know them?
4. What do your customers want from your web site?
5. How often will you need to update your site and how do you want to do that?
6. How do you market your web site?
7. What related web sites will link to yours (colleagues, professional associations, etc..)?
8. What technologies and services does your web site need (downloadable content, accept payments, blog, bulletin board, etc…)?
9. What do you want your site to look like (make a list of other sites you like)?

After answering these questions, a knowledgeable web designer/developer should be able to help identify whether you need a traditional ‘static’ site, or a CMS  (Content Management System), or a blog, or some combination of these.

Some of these answers will help you think about whether to use traditional forms of marketing, or if social media might be a good solution.

The most important goal of these questions is start looking at your website objectively, from the perspective of a potential client or user. To create a successful site that resonates, learn to look at it from the outside in like a user/client rather than from the inside out like an owner.

Filed under: web development by James_Fryer
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The reason to use Google Voice is that it lets you use your existing phones. So you can use your home phone, but the person on the other end only every sees your Google Voice number.

Google Voice is a free virtual telephone number. It’s not a physical phone. Calls to your Google Voice number get forwarded to any phone (or phones) you choose and the caller only sees your GV (Google Voice) number.

You can also make calls using GV from any of your existing phones. You can start the call from the GV website. Either select a contact, or type in a number then choose which of you phones you want to make the call from. When you hit the call button, your GV number will call you. Answer that phone and GV will then connect your call and the person on the other end will see your GV number, not the number of the phone you are actually calling from. You will be using minutes and incurring long distance charges for the phone you are using, unless you also use Google Talk with Google Voice.

Google Talk is a text and video chat plugin for Gmail that now also can make telephone calls from your PC (or Mac). Calling within the US is free and there are inexpensive rates for several foreign countries.

Google Voice has many more great features, like transcribed voice messages. When someone calls your GV number, but you don’t pickup it gets sent to GV voice mail where it is transcribed (with varying degrees of success) and delivered to your inbox where you can read it.

But I primarily use GV for calling clients from my home line. To do that,  I go to my GV account, find the contact I want to call (or type in their number), then choose my home phone (from a list of phones I’ve activated with GV) and click the call button. My home phone then rings and the call is then sent to my client and their phone starts ringing. On caller ID, they see my GV number and I am able to use my home phone which has unlimited long distance and often better sound quality than my mobile phone.

I can just as easily plug in my headset to my laptop and cal using Google Talk. my client still would have seen my GV number.

Filed under: computers / internet, Small Business by James_Fryer
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The following is a list of a few helpful resources to get started with understanding and implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is the process of getting your site into good shape so that search engines can find your content, index it, and then serve it up to people who are searching for it.

The term SEO it a loaded one, not everyone likes it and with good reason. There are ‘bad’ ways to do it that will piss off Google, you don’t want to piss off Google. The list below includes only ‘white hat’ SEO tips, tips that won’t piss off Google:

• Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF)
• Matt Cutts reviews websites and how well they are optimized (YouTube Video)
• Explanation of “Canonical” and how to implement it by Vanessa Fox
• Google Web Master Tools helps analyse and optimize your site
• Use Fetch as Googlebot (part of Google Web Master Tools under the ‘Labs’ tab) to see your web pages the way Google sees them
• Use Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool to optimize the keywords on your website
• Use Google’s Backlink Tool (part of Google Web Master Tools) to see who is linking to your pages

Filed under: computers / internet, SEO, web development by James_Fryer
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Raw Therapee (THe Experimental RAw Photo Editor) is a treasure for digital photographers who shoot in RAW. It supports many RAW files types from the most popular Digital SLRs, details on supported cameras can be found on their site.

Raw Therapee opens and edits RAW files. Just point it to a directory of RAW files and it will generate thumbnails of RAW files (and JPEG files) from that directory. Double click on a thumbnail to bring it into the main editing window. Now you can make a wide range of modifications:

• White Balance
• Exposure
• Highlight Recovery
• Shadows/Highlights
• Sharpening
• Color Boost
• Color Shift
• Luminance Curve
• Luminance Noise Reduction
• Color Noise Reduction

These are the main options on the right hand side of the screen. On the left is a history panel listing each change you make. This is very handy, it allows you to simply click on an earlier action to see what the image looked like at that stage. And if you want to revert to that point, simply click on that action and continue working.

It is not a great way to manage your photo collection, Picassa does a much better job of that, but it is substantially better at making adjustments to an image. My work flow still starts in Picassa to quickly review my photos. I then delete the hopeless images and pick a few for further editing in Raw Therapee. Once editing is complete in Raw Therapee, I save the photo as a PNG. This is easily done with the “Save Image” in the lower right corner of the application and can be customized in the program options.

My initial response is that it is at least as capable as Photoshop (I have CS2), but probably better for ‘developing’ and image and certainly a lot faster. But it’s not a fair comparison, Photoshop is designed to do more then develop a photo. Raw Therapee is really in the same league as Lightroom and Aperture. I can not speak to how it compares to Aperture because Aperture crashed the first time I used it and I decided I did not need that in a photo editor and ended my evaluation there. I did use Lightroom during a 30 trial and really fell in love with it. I would purchase that Lightroom if it were not so overpriced. It is especially annoying to know that Lightroom was based on a free application.

The million dollar question: how well does Raw Therapee compare to Lightroom? I would prefer to use Lightroom, it has a broader set of tools. But, I use Raw Therapee because of the price. It’s free, but a program of so much value, I am glad to give the developers a ‘donation’. It is still under development so it might well become a threat to Lightroom.

Raw Therapee is available for Windows and Linux.

P.S. I’ve moved my blog over to Blogger. And I have a section for Photography News and Reviews. WordPress and Blogger are both great and I can’t really say one is better than the other.

Filed under: computers / internet, photography by James_Fryer
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It is sad when one gets so excited with such a trivial bit of obscure code. That is what has happened to me… again. This time I stumbled across the Definition List tag. It operates similar to other types of lists, you start with a containing tag <dl> and populate it with a list of items. But, where it differs from ordered and unordered lists is that there are two item types in the list; Definition Term <dt> and Definition Definition (or Data Definition) <dd>. Most all browsers will render the two lines differently, typically indenting the <dd>, like so:

farm

a place to grow food

school

a place to grow knowledge

The code looks like this:

<dl>
<dt>farm</dt>
<dd>a place to grow food</dd>
<dt>school</dt>
<dd>a place to grow knowledge</dd>
</dl>

But, what got me so excited was the prospect of being able to seamlessly style to different types of data in a list. It is when you add CSS to the mix that things get interesting. Rather then showing you what can be done by adding CSS, I encourage you to go give it a whirl.

You might ask how I got this far without having learned anything about this before. That is one of the pitfalls of being self taught, and rather haphazardly self taught at that. I tend to wonder around HTML learning little bits here and there, I took no structured course, just learned what I needed when I needed it. It is a process that works as everything I learn gets puts into action right away and the chaff gets dismissed. But, it also leads to holes in my knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Filed under: web development by James_Fryer
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