AFROmedia is here to make it digital

What I use to resize and crop photos

Image via CrunchBase

This is a great bit of software that I use all the time. Yes I know how to use Photoshop but that is not in everybody’s budget and learning curve. I have download Picasa from Google and that is what I use. My kids also use it, as they love to check out all the pictures from when they where babies or the latest something something we just had. Picasa is ideal for a blogger or a person that wants to update there own website. I use it for more then that also. The best part is it is FREE!!

So here is what you can do with Picasa from Google.

• Download pictures directly from your camera.
• You can re-size your pictures, ideal for upload to your website or blog. You can do it in bulk.
• You can do some basic cropping. Ideal if you need that panoramic picture for the header of your blog.
• Perfect to just keep your pictures all in one place and organized.
• You can add a text watermark, ideal if you want to copyright your pictures.

I think the best way to get started and see the fun in some of your old pictures is to download Picasa from google install it and see the magic.

Tags: google, Photograph, Picasa, Picasa Web Albums

Features and benefits of a website

So now it is your turn

I want to know that if you wanted a website, what kind of features or benefits would you like. Think of it this way, you have unlimted budget, creativity and time what would your site have and what could it do.  I think I would sitting on a kayak and taking people on kayak tours in Croatia. I would update my website via email with photos, and video of the latest trip I have just done. So that the next people that want to come on the trip could not wait. I don’t want to have to worry about all this html, css and strange language the developers talk.

So let me know what you would like from your website.

Some experimenting

Rich Mulholland a few months ago (blush) ask if this is something I would consider. A sort of thing where you can put a website into a slide show. So I did some experimenting and have managed to find something to get a few images to sit full screen in the background of your site and you can control them with your arrow keys or click on the buttons. Check it out here Full screen power point website. Here are some examples of what else you could use it for and the system I used. Thanks to Supersized for this.

Just need to think of a site I can use this for.

Excellent website chap for trouble shooting

Hi All

Two things. Firstly I’ve launched a new website for destination curators and peripatetic scribes called travelwrites … please check it out at www.travelwrite.co.za and subscribe, “like” it on Facebook at www.facebook.com/travelwrite and pse follow my blog on networked blogs http://networkedblogs.com/blog/travelwrite.co.za/, which incidentally is a great free social media tool as it automatically posts new updates to twitter and facebook – a huge time saver.

Secondly, none of this would have been possible for a Luddite like me, if it were not for the constant patience and hand-holding of Lantz Mattinson, based in Joburg who builds websites, and better still, teaches you how to work  in word press, load google ads, and ja, all the stuff you need to know. So if you need help building or upgrading your site or starting a blog or any sort of web-related trouble shooting, Lantz is your man. His email address is lantz@afromedia.co.za. His website is http://www.afromedia.co.za/ and his phone number is 0836819281

Cheers
Caroline

Social Media challenges and what you can do about it.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Social Media is a great place to get your word out there fast. The trick is you do need people to be listening to you. In facebook the listening is called “like” so if somebody likes you they are listening to you.  In twitter it is called “followers” so if you have followers they are listening to you. The challenge is to get followers and likes and yes we can ask and maybe even beg people. I personally think the best way to get likes and followers is to provide good quality content. I ask new clients who their target market is and most of the time they say everybody. Well social media will prove you so wrong. I am not sure of the number of pages that facebook has but there are lots and lots. Not only facebook, what about websites and new social media platforms and who knows what. Just have a look at this http://namechk.com/ and you will just see a drop in the ocean. Almost a day does not go by and I get requests to join this and that and I have had to just stop. I am sticking to a few social media sites and my good old trusty email.

Ok so lets see what we can do to get some social media love.
Well for a start admit that your target market is now everybody. The powerful part of the internet is the niche. You now like never before have access to your niche market, and if you share that same passion they will love you and they will follow you. So start by checking if people are already chatting about your kind of product or service. Don’t just dive right in and make another page on facebook. Become involved with the people. Social media is the braai and at a braai you interact you don’t just tell people your stuff all the time.

Make a twitter page and then do 3 things. The first thing is make sure your profile is 100% correct and you have a picture. Write some interesting tweets and interesting shares. The last step is to find some people to follow. Then repeat steps 2 and 3 every day. And soon enough you have have people finding you and following you.

Take it slow and just keep building it every day and before you know it you will be so liked and have lots of followers. I think you will also pick up lots of tips as you go.

Keep it fun.

Tags: Business, Facebook, Social media, Twitter

Posterous rocks

I love posterous, you can get a website up and running fast. One of the magic parts for me is the way you update your posts by just sending posterous a mail, it is a special mail just for your site. You can attach video, power point, PDF’s, a whole wack of images and it just sorts it out for you. The other magic part is the autopost. How that works is you have a facebook page, a twitter, YouTube, maybe a WordPress or a blogger, and who knows what other social media accounts. Wait I forgot to mention flickr and picasaweb, they are ideal for storing pictures. So you email your post to posterous and it sorts it out, send it to your twitter, updates your facebook, if you sent a video it adds it to youtube. Your images go off to your flickr or picasaweb account. It is just mind blowing and you websites need to be IT. Sorry for you.

So here are a few case studies.

Image via Wikipedia

Penguin Promises: I was asked to setup a campaign where  a few people wanted to make a lot of people aware the plight of the African Penguins. They wanted to hook up the social media with the website being the center of the whole thing. So posterous to the rescue, we even hooked up the domain http://penguinpromises.com/ So I signed them up to facebook twitter etc and got the ball rolling. They where super excited that they could just update via email. The Ladies doing the campaign had blackberries so it worked like a charm and they hooked up the facebook so they could also interact with the comments. This campaign is ongoing and the facebook friends keeps climbing.

Fishing Encounters: I am a bit of a mad keen fisherman, not the kind that sits on the bank and waits. I tried but it was just not for me. I am the one the loves lure fishing and fishing off my fishingski out in the ocean or bass fishing on my kayak, looking in every nook and cranny in a dam for that BIG bass. So I wanted a place to share my stories and again posterous was it. I have also 3 other plans that I am testing for this site, adwords, adsense and selling of a Hunterski fishing Kayak. So I go through my photos and pick a few and write a story about them, it is amazing how the photos make the story writing juices flow. I have hooked up facebook page and a twitter, every other day I hook into my twitter and find a few new followers, taking it slow and easy. I have hooked up a blogger account for the adsense, still tweaking it, but if I get traffic maybe I can get a few buck back on the clicks. Here is the blogger website, very plain and simple http://fishingencounters.blogspot.com/ I have also hooked up a fishing encounters facebook. Ok the adwords part. I won a R500 adwords voucher, so I am using that to drive people to my website to purchase a kayak, I know that a kayak is not impulse purchase so I am also allowing people to get a discount coupon, time will tell if this is going to work. I am adding it to the learning curve and will keep doing experiments with this project.

John Colours: Last one for now, still work in progress but I got Johan a site up and running for his roof painting and waterproofing business. We are still in the early stages and still need to hook up a few of the social media sites, the nice part for Johan is he can update his website by just sending an email. So we he goes to a job site he can take some before and after pictures and pop a mail to his site and it is updated with fresh content. We will be hooking up his John Colours Facebook page soon.

Here are a few more sites I have setup with posterous. Nice and easy and for different reasons.

http://skitravelsa.posterous.com/ they update there galley via email http://www.champagneholidays.com/gallery.html no need to know how to re-size pictures
http://animalkeepertraining.posterous.com/ a central hub for collecting data, later to be used to make courses
http://rethinkthebag.org/ something is busy happening

Tags: Facebook, Posterous, Social media, Twitter, website, YouTube

Google Translate

I find the odd thing on the web, mostly due to citizens request. No website is ever the same and each citizen has there own ideas so this has over the years exposed me to many ideas. My one citizen has kept these things that I find and called them Lantz’s gems. She has suggested a add them to the blog as other citizens might also find them very useful. Well thanks Heather from funeralguide I think that is a very cool idea. So I have made a category called Gems and will fill it up with interesting things I find.

I am starting off with Google Translate, http://translate.google.com/

I have played with Google Translate and it is so cool. I while back my daughter got a mail from a swiss person because he was looking for a person with the same name as my daughter. It was in Swedish and My wife and daughter did not know what he was saying. So off they went to Google Translate and pasted the email in there and translated it to English. Walaha all sorted and they responded. Later on I came across a website that hase translation options and I could see that it used google somehow. Well it was one of those things that sticks in the back of your mind. The other day I had a meeting with a citizen and he was discussing his training idea and the need for it in Africa and that got me to thinking about translate. So I want to the site and saw that you could just pop a web address in the translate box and it would translate a website. Well that was fantastic and I was super impressed so I sent it off to the citizen. He was also super excited and asked if I could do it for his website. Well I was sure I could, so off I went to the joomla extensions and found it soon enough. Installed it and it was up and running in no time. Check it out here AKAAfrica it is on the left just below the donate block. That is the nice part of joomla CMS for me is that it can be flexible and expandable.

Tags: google, Google Translate

What do I have to offer?

I have a good understanding of business online and always keen to learn something new.

I am able to translate the clients’ needs into a workable solution on the Internet and have patience.

I see the Internet as a place full of business opportunities, and some fun, not only for myself but also for my employer and their clients.

I am open to ideas, enjoy brainstorming and turning some of the ideas into reality, no matter what the challenge.

I have good people skills and would like to be able to interact with clients to determine what Internet business solutions or social media solutions we can give them.

I enjoy working as a member of a team.

Sharing is caring and that is what I believe.

Because the internet is changing at such a quick speed, I constantly keep unto date with what is going down on the interweb.

For me this is not just a job, the web is part of my lifestyle.

I love all the web 2.0 stuff and am a big user of open source applications like Joomla, WordPress, to name just a few.

I feel I am rather good at Joomla, WordPress and figuring things out.

What you get when I build a website

This has been bothering me in my mind for a bit and I think I need to run the whole story. So I get a mail please quote me for a website it is about 10 pages. It will be a simple site. Cool so in my mind I feel like this is somebody fishing for prices and I am not going to go and spend hours making up a quote as time is money. So I give them an amount and say it will be between R4000 and R5000. Then what happens is the person will email me back and say that is too much, how much will it cost me to do 3 pages? Well then I loose it and throw the cat across the room. Well not really that is why I am now making this post so that I can explain what you get when I build a website.

Step one. I don’t build pages. I makes sites that use content management systems. In short what this means is you can have 3 pages or 1000 pages or more. It is not a problem to add them and with some training you could do it yourself. So again in more detail a content management system would be like your operating system for your computer, it could be windows, mac or ubuntu. I use 2 systems just depending on what site I am going to develop, one is wordpress and the other is joomla. WordPress for me is ideal for small websites and blogs and it comes with some great plug-ins to extend the site. Joomla for me is perfect for bigger sites where I will need to add some serious functionality like shopping carts, membership areas online payments and a bit more control of the content we add. Both of these cms  (content management systems) are opensource so you are free to use them yourself. Me fee come in on the time I spend installing them and getting them working the way a client requires. The beauty of it is I don’t have to reinvent the wheel with each development.

Step two. A nice design, surely you want the site to look nice and have your logo on it so that people can see it is your company. Also you want it to look professional the web is a great place where you can compete with the big boys and people will not think less of you. They might if your design looks like it was made with clip art. I good design could take between half a day and a full day. The design is just a flat image that will represent your website. It will take into account functionality and any other flash animation or some extra cool goodies. This will be bounced around a bit with the client to make sure all parties are happy.

Step three. Converting that design into a functioning website template.  Why I say template because the design will be carried throughout the site and we only need to make one page that looks correct. The system will take care of where content will be displayed when we click on a menu item.

Step four. Add the content. There is a place where you can make pages and pages of content and organize it all nicely. I am downplaying this a bit as there are a few extra steps to get it all right and don’t forget sometime we need to add pictures.

Step five. Making the site live. Most of the time the site while it is being developed will be hidden from the public eye. We will now need to expose it to the public. This entails putting the site on the correct domain www.mysite.co.za for example. then we need to let the search engines know there is a new site here. That is when I use google webmaster and bing webmaster and yahoo webmaster. I will register the clients website with each off these and submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file that will tell the webmasters all the content on the site. One last thing is analytics, all my sites have analytics so that I can tell how many people are popping in for a visit.

Next time you ask for a quote don’t just take it at face value, I have been in the business for over 10 years and I have seen a few things in my life. What happens is once the site has gone live people turn around and say ok so how do I get it to the top of google or my site is live but I am getting no business. Well that will be a post for another time.

In closing I do go to a lot of effort and I can’t make the price less because I can’t remove the value you will get when you show the world your site. I am giving you an opportunity to have the ride of your life don’t choose a piece of junk because I can’t be involved in that. I am negotiable on how we will pay the fees.

Tags: Content management system, Joomla, website, wordpress

Launching a website is NOT an orgasm

I am a person that used to believe that when you launched a website there would be fireworks, the earth would shake and pigeons would burst into flight. After a few years of expecting this I have seen the error in my ways. I don’t really know were to put the launching of a website if I had to compare it to sex. I could compare having a website to marriage and know the more attention you give it the better it will reward you. I think each time you launch a website it is more like getting to know your partner better.

A website is a partnership, you can’t just make it put it out there and hope people will love it. It takes work, listening to what people are saying checking the trends of the world, deciding what you want to do and then doing something. I know it is overwhelming but you can only take one step at a time, that is the law of the universe. No matter which way you step it will only be one step. So go ahead and take a step. I promise you it will be fulled with the whole range of emotions but the reward at the end of the day is so worth it. It is so much greater then an orgasm I would make it part of you bucket list.

Tags: website