The New Age of Advertising: Social Media Networking.

The giant social networks platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the most well known, but there are a ton of other social networking sites that you can use to expand your business and create free to very cheap advertisement. Each have unique strengths, But if you're looking for a way to create a community for your small business around visual storytelling, there's one obvious choice.

Everyone knows about Flickr by now. The photo and video sharing community started up in 2004, was bought by Yahoo! a year later, and has since grown into a behemoth. Flickr boasts 50 million registered users and attracts 80 million unique visitors every month. While it doesn't have the sheer size of Facebook, nor the rapid response of Twitter, it can be an equally (or even more) powerful tool to connect with and engage your customers. Why? Photography can open up whole new worlds.

But how would you take advantage of this? Like any other social network, Flickr should not be considered a marketing platform. It's not a place to tout and sell products. It's a place that can help you develop your brand and get close to your customers. And most importantly, it's a place for them to interact with you, and become a part of the experience.

here is a quick 10 point list written by EMILIA DOERR  on how to start on the Flikr road of social media marketing.
These days, Google search results show not only webpages, but also images, videos, maps, audio, and other media (called “universal search”). Certain kinds of local businesses can take advantage of images that may show up when people search for keywords related to your business — especially travel-related businesses (hotels, restaurants, etc.), clothing boutiques, photography businesses, gift shops, galleries, some corporations, etc.
Flickr is a highly indexed website for photo and video sharing owned by Yahoo. Local business owners can share images on Flickr to boost their online brand and increase search engine visibility.
Each photo page you create on Flickr will get indexed by the search engines and may even rank highly on its own — boosting your local visibility and your potential to drive additional traffic to your site.

How to Use Flickr to Boost Your Local Business:

• Account. Open a free account with Flickr. If you find you’re using Flickr a lot, the Pro membership is $24.95 annually. Select the option to make your photos publicly viewable.
• Uploading. Start uploading quality images to Flickr. These can include logos, headshots, travel scenes, and product images.
• Titles. Create strong, keyword-rich, catchy, and descriptive titles for each photo to boost search engine visibility. Think about unique ways to motivate users to click on your image.
• Descriptions. Write careful descriptions for each image. Your local organization may have a killer logo or a great product, but ask yourself why prospects for your business would care about it. Then in the description, tell them something you may not be able to share with them on your corporate website. Give people a reason to connect with you.
• Links. Add hyperlinks in your descriptions to relevant pages on your site — making sure to use local keywords in the linked text.
• Local place names. Boost your local search engine visibility by using local search keywords for communities you are targeting (for example, Ventura, CA or Camarillo, CA) in your titles, descriptions, tags, and linked text.
• Tags. Tag each photo with descriptive, searchable keywords. Be sure to include place names in the tags to attract qualified searches.
• Profile. Optimize your Flickr profile page and Flickr photo “sets” with search-friendly titles, tags, fun and informative descriptions, and links.
• Flickr Groups. Be social. Get additional exposure for your photos by joining relevant groups and posting your photos there. This is also a great opportunity to connect directly with locals in your area of service.
• Other social media connections. You may want to share your Flickr photo pages on social sites such as Facebook and Delicious, especially if your image or video has viral potential.

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Regardless of the site of your business, Social media platforms are the new phone book, the new newspaper ad, times are changing and so are the way we advertise.

you can click this here to see  a slideshow made using Flickr to showcase some of my old artwork, the same can be used to showcase a new product, a grand opening or event, or anything, skies the limit!

CSS Tooltips without the Javascript

Tooltips are a fantastic method of showing your user more information by hovering over an image, text, or other element on your site.

While there are plenty of solutions using JavaScript and a JQuery Framework, not every web developer knows JavaScript and not every user can utilize JavaScript. A lot of users have downloaded plugins to their browsers which block annoying JavaScript code such as Ads, but these plugins can sometimes prevent code specifically meant to make the website run properly. We are going to explore a pure CSS method of designing and making tool tips to avoid this very problem

we will begin with writing some simple markup for the link. you will need to give it a title which we will use for the tooltip content, and assign it a class:

next is to create some basic CSS styling for our tooltip class:

Our tooltip is now being displayed inline with our link using the position "relative". Next up is to create a dialogue box to contain the body of the tooltip, and place it so it floats above the link:

We are using the :hover and the :after selectors, which selects an element, in this case our link, on mouse over and inserts content after the selected element. We have specified a black background with 80% opacity, and for browsers that do not support RGBA colors we have provided a dark grey background. Slightly rounded corners are created by using the border-radius attribute and we have set the text color to white. Lastly, we have positioned the tooltip box from the left of the link and added a little padding. As well as the styling and positioning, we have set the content property:

This property allows us to insert the content we want which can be a string, a media file or an attribute of the element. In this case we are using the title attribute of the link. Now when you hover over your link a tooltip should be appear above it with the text you set as your link title. We have one problem though, the title information is being shown twice: once in the tooltip and once by the browser. To fix this we need to make a slight change to our HTML:

What we've done here is is wrap the link text in a span tag with its own title attribute. Now the browser will display the title set in the span tag when the link is hovered over. To finish we will add an arrow to the bottom of the tooltip, to give it that little extra touch of style. We do this by using the :before selector and some border styles:

We are using a few border hacks here to create the effect of an arrow: setting the border colors on the left and right to transparent and controlling the border widths. We’ve also positioned the arrow so it sits on the bottom of the tooltip box. And there you have it, a simple tooltip with the title tag of the element hovered over. You could also use this for image alt tags, or even just put your own text into the CSS to pop up where you want.

I would like to give credit to Keenan Payne for helping me with this blog, he is a great web designer and blogger who put in his time to assist me. check out some of his articles below.

How to take WordPress to the cloud with Amazon S3 & CloudFront
Creating a modal window with HTML5 & CSS3

Everything But The Kitchen Sink.

As a  web designer, you strive to impress a client or make a website that POPS, you throw in a hundred different design elements, a complex color pallet and everything else but the kitchen sink. More often than not, this results in a website that looks crowded or distracts from the actual content of the page. Something I've recently become a big fan of is the "Minimalist" approach. Minimalism is exactly what it sounds like, a very light website with very few bells and whistles with a clean look. I'm such a big fan; I thought I would share with you 9 beautiful minimal websites I've found crawling the web.

 #1        Friends Of The Web

                 #2             Paravel Inc.                           

                            #3             Phillip House

                            #4          Harlo Interactive

                            #5  Derwent & Tamar Chambers

                           #6               D & AD

                            #7               IXI Store

                            #8              DITTO

                           #9          Web Is Love