11 Reasons Why You Should Have a Web Site
Posted by Jennifer Farley | March 30, 2007
1. To Establish A Presence
Approximately 750 million people worldwide have access to the World Wide Web (WWW). No matter what your business is, you can’t ignore 750 million people.
2. To Make Business Information Available
What is basic business information? Think of a Yellow Pages ad. What are your hours? What do you do? How can someone contact you? What methods of payment do you take? Where are you located? Now think of a Yellow Pages ad where you have instant communication. What is today’s special offer? Today’s interest rate? Next week’s sale information? If you could keep your customer informed of every reason why they should do business with you, don’t you think you could do more business? You can on the WWW.
3. To Heighten Public Interest
With Web page information, anybody anywhere who can access the Web and hears about you is a potential visitor to your Web site and a potential customer for your information there. People from other towns, counties and even other countries can find out information about who you are and what you do.
4. To Network
A lot of what passes for business is simply nothing more than making connections with other people. Every smart business person knows, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Passing out your business card is part of every good meeting and every business person can tell more than one story how a chance meeting turned into the big deal. Well, what if you could pass out your business card to thousands, maybe millions of potential clients and partners, saying this is what I do and if you are ever in need of my services, this is how you can reach me. You can, 24 hours a day, inexpensively and simply, on the WWW.
5. To Sell Things
Before people decide to become customers, they want to know about you, what you do and what you can do for them. Which you can do easily and inexpensively on the WWW. Then you might be able to turn visitors to your site into customers.
6. To reach a highly desirable demographic market
The demographic of the WWW user is probably the highest mass-market demographic available. Usually college-educated or being college educated, making a high salary or soon to make a high salary, it’s no wonder that Wired magazine, the magazine of choice to the Internet community, has no problem getting Lexus and other high-end marketers advertising. Even with the addition of the commercial on-line community, the demographic will remain high for many years to come.
7. To Answer Frequently Asked questions
Whoever answers the phones in your company can tell you, their time is usually spent answering the same questions over and over again. These are the questions customers and potential customers want to know the answer to before they deal with you. Post them on a WWW page and you will have removed another barrier to doing business with you and freed up some time for that harried phone operator.
8. To Make Changing Information Available Quickly
Sometimes, information changes before it gets off the press. Now you have a pile of expensive, worthless paper. Electronic publishing changes with your needs. No paper, no ink, no printers bill. You can even attach your web page to a database which customizes the page’s output to a database you can change as many times in a day as you need. No printed piece can match that flexibility.
9. To Allow Feedback From Customers
With a Web page, you can ask for feedback and get it instantaneously with no extra cost. An instant e-mail response can be built into Web pages and can get the answer while its fresh in your customers mind, without the cost and lack of response of business reply mail.
10. To Reach The Specialized Market
Sell bee hives, art prints, rowing boats? You may think that the Internet is not a good place to be. Well, think again. The Internet isn’t just computer science students anymore. With the 700 million and growing users of the WWW, even the most narrowly defined interest group will be represented in large numbers. Since the Web has several very good search programs, your interest group will be able to find you, or your competitors.
11. To Serve Your Local Market
We’ve talked about the power to serve the world with a Web page. But what about your own town? If you are located in Westmeath, Cork, Sligo or Dublin, there is probably enough local customers with Web access to make it worth your while to consider Web marketing. A local Blackrock sandwich bar even takes lunch orders through the Internet!
Photoshop Quick Tip : Exporting your layers as separate documents
Posted by Jennifer | March 29, 2007
This is a very quick tip today, but a handy one. If you are working on a document in Photoshop with multiple layers, it is possible to export each of those layers as separate documents. An example where I use this is if I have made up a document with several of my photos to work on, when I’m finished I can just shoot them out.
All you need to do is choose File > Scripts > Export Layers to Files.
Photoshop Quick Tip : Find your layers fast
Posted by Jennifer | March 27, 2007
When you’re working on a large document in Photoshop with many layers, a quick way to jump to the layer you want to work on is to:
- Select the Move tool by pressing V on the keyboard.
- Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac) on a portion of the image.
A menu will appear when you click and will list all of the layers underneath your cursor.
- To make a particular layer active, just click on it in the list of layers. Now, you’ve got your active layer.
If you click Right-click or Control-click on a part of the image where there are no layers or if the layer is transparent in that area, then only the Background layer will be listed in the menu.
Book Review : Digital Photography by Scott Kelby
Posted by Jennifer | March 26, 2007
I would consider this a must-have reference book for digital photography fans. It’s written in the humourous but fact-filled Scott Kelby style and covers a wide range of photography subjects. The full title of the book is : “The Digital Photography Book: The Step-By-Step Secrets for How to Make Your Photos Look Like the Pros’!” and that’s literally what the book offers. Step by step instructions over eleven chapters on Landscape photography, Flower photography, Portraits, Travel, Sports photography and more.
I’ve read a lot of photography books and this one is without question one of the easiest to understand and immediately apply to your own photography. Also it’s not too expensive and is well worth the money.
Digital Photography by Scott Kelby
5 stars out of 5.
Check this book and other’s like it in the Digital Design Cottage Bookshelf.
Photoshop Tutorial : Creating an Ansel Adams Style photograph
Posted by Jennifer | March 23, 2007
Here’s a quick photoshop video tutorial I made which shows you how to use the Colour Mixer to create a very “contrasty” black and white image.
Creating An Ansel Adams Style Photograph In Photoshop -
Photoshop Tutorial : How to create a simple logo using Photoshop
Posted by Jennifer | March 22, 2007
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to make a simple logo. Many professional logos are created in Illustrator or Freehand or other vector drawing programs. However, it is possible to create logos in Photoshop either as a raster image or using Photoshop’s own vector tools including the Pen, Shapes and the Type tools. Vector tools are used most often for logo design because once the design is created there is no loss of quality when making the problem making the logo larger or smaller and so that’s what we’ll used.
A good logo has the following qualities:
1. Logos are simple. They need to be practical and work in both colour and black and white.
2. They communicate an idea, a principle or a description.
3. They are aesthetically pleasing.
That’s what we’ll aim for.
I’m going to create a logo for a fictional company called “The Iron Mongers” who create unique iron work gates. We’ll also add the words “Iron Boutique” as the tagline.
Start with a blank document size 5 in x 5 in with a resolution of 300 ppi. It’s important to have a high resolution document in case you want to print your logo rather than just use it on the web.
Select the Type tool 
and in the Control Palette, set the font to Bernhard Modern, size 36, set the anti-aliasing to Strong and the colour to Black.
Click on the document and add the text “The Iron Mongers”.
With the Type tool still selected, go back and highlight the word “Iron”. Click on the colour selector on the Control Palette and change the colour to red. (I used RGB values 204, 0, 0). Click on any other tool to commit the text.
Select the text tool again, and in the Control Palette leave the Font as Bernhard Modern but set the size to 14pt and the colour to black. Underneath the words “The Iron Mongers”, add the text “Iron Boutique”.
In the layers palette, select the Iron Mongers text layer and Shift + Click to also select the Iron Boutique layer.
On the Control Palette, select the “Align Horizontal Centers” button to line up the two layers of text. 
Click on the Line Tool
(it might be hidden under the Rectangle Tool) and in the Control palette, set the weight of the line to 2 pixels.
Draw a straight line (hold down the Shift key to keep the line straight) from under the capital T till it just meets the I in Iron Boutique. Draw another line on the other side of the Boutique to just underneath the small s. (See illustration below).
Lines are a very effective design tool and can elevate a design to another level.
Now we’re going to add a shape as an embellishment. Select the Custom Shape Tool 
(it will be hidden beneath the line tool).
On the Control Palette, click on the Custom Shape Tool drop down box. I chose a shape called Hedera 2.
Drag out the Hedera 2 shape. Drag the shape so it is approximately the same height as the letters in the “The Iron Mongers”. 
When you drag out the shape you are creating a path. You can see the outline of the work path on the image but to add actual pixels by filling or stroking the path, you must click on the paths palette.
Create a new layer, then in the paths palette, click on the workpath to highlight it. You will see the two lines that you drew with the line tool as well as the new shape you created.
Make sure the foreground colour is set to black (press D on the keyboard to set the colours to their default of black foreground and white background). Click on the Fill path with foreground colour button at the bottom of the paths palette. When you click this button black pixels are added to the new layer you created.
The new shape looks pretty fuzzy around the edges, this is only because the path is still selected, click anywhere on the grey area of the Paths palette to deslect the path.
Back on the new layer you created, click on the new leaf using the Move tool and drag out holding the Alt (PC) or Option (Mac) key. This will create a duplicate of the leaf. Drag the duplicate to the other side of the logo, then choose Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal to flip the leaf to the opposite direction.
That completes the logo.
Always save your file as a .PSD file so that you come back and edit it in the future if necessary.
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About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
