|
|
e_Marketing Blog Free Blog or Your Own Domain? Once you've decided to create your own blog, the first question you have to address is whether you want your blog to be hosted on your own web hosting account or be part of an already established site like wordpress.com, blogger.com, or one of the many other free blogging sites. If you use one of the free "hosted" blogging sites (Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog.com, and many more) you can create a brand new blog in about 15 minutes. When you choose this option you become part of a larger site such as wordpress.com and your address will be something like http://yourtownrealestate.wordpress.com or http://yourtownmoneymanager.blogspot.com The advantage of this approach is that it is fast and cheap. Plus you will get some traction and search engine exposure for your blog because it will be part of a much larger network that gets crawled by the search engines on a regular basis. But in my estimation, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Upgrading to Wordpress 2.7 Just finished upgrading one of my many Wordpress blogs to v 2.7 - the newest upgrade which was released on Dec. 10 makes several attractive improvements to the interface. This upgrade is not so concerned with functionality as it is with improving the user interface. I was able to upgrade my Article Marketing blog in about 15 minutes when all was said and done. There were no suprises and no hitches along the way. I'm sure subsequent upgrades on other sites will go faster. Communicating With Your Real Estate Agent In an article called The Future of Real Estate Communication Phoenix area real estate specialist and blogger Jay Thompson suggests that agents who want to be in the loop with the next generation of home buyers had better understand the communication media they use. Text messaging is something that has become second nature to young people as young as 9 or 10 years old, and it has basically made email obsolete as a way for teenagers to communicate with one another. Thompson reports that in December his two teenagers sent and received about 10,000 text messages - that's about 83 messages each per day - while his 17 year old son claims to have sent maybe 10 emails in the whole month. On the other hand Thompson himself - a technology savvy parent and real estate agent - has more than 5,000 email messages in his inbox, and most of his own text messages have been back and forth with his children. So there is clearly a "generation gap" when it comes to the use of electronic messaging. As he says, "The point is, the way we communicate is changing. According to some researchers there will be 2.3 trillion text messages sent this year. Wikipedia says that 80% of 13 – 24 year olds use text messaging (compared to 18% of 40 – 49 year olds). That’s a whole lot of texting by a whole lot of soon to be first-time home buyers." The other change that has already taken place over the last couple of years is the way an increasing number of people use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. People who would not think of using a stuffy email message to talk to each other find themselves commenting to each other back and forth through Facebook and Twitter. Not only are these becoming mature communication channels between people, but companies and entrepreneurs are finding innovative ways to interact with customers and prospects through these massively popular media. The bottom line is that real estate agents will have to accommodate themselves to the communication media used by their clients. That means if they want to reach young people who are plugged into these non-traditional modes of communication, they themselves will have to become plugged in. |
Linknet-News.com features news articles and news items in various categories including Health News, Real Estate News, Finance News, Marketing News, Business News, Entertainment News, Travel News, and more... Quark or Photoshop for Large Format Design?Apr 10, 2006 - Linknet Product News Quark or PhotoShop for Your Large Format Design? Apr 10, 2006 - Linknet Products - by Rick HendershotWhen you are creating large graphics for printing on trade show displays or large vinyl banners for backdrops and display areas, is it better to assemble your graphics in a page layout program like Quarkxpress, or should you do them all as one image in Photoshop or some similar program? Here are a couple important considerations... Consideration #1 - Flexibility and Ease of Design Those of us used to doing print advertising -- things like brochures, posters, and magazine ads -- have traditionally assembled our projects in a page layout program like Quark (or Indesign, PageMaker, and sometimes CorelDraw). This kind of program makes it possible to prepare separate elements in Photoshop or Illustrator or Coreldraw, and then import them into position in the page layout program (Quark) and then integrate them with text of various sizes, faces and alignments. This approach is particularly useful when your document has lots of text -- like a brochure for instance. The text handling capabilities of these page layout programs are outstanding. They are much, much more powerful than a program like Microsoft Word. You can take individual blocks of text and control their properties independently of any other blocks of text on the page. Then you can lay them on top of other layers, overprint the text on top of photos, or even knock it out in red or white (or any other color you can think of). For large display designs text handling is not as important as file size and the ability to easily make adjustments to your final design. Often last minute changes will require you to tweak your design. In many cases the file has already been sent to the printing company. If a simple text change has to be made they are quite capable of making it for you. They don't have to go back to some previous verions of the file to move something around or change a phone number. They just open the Quark file and make an adjustment to that particular element.  This approach also minimizes the overall file size. For instance, if you want to create a design like the one above -- "Orange Hair Girl" -- the overall file size can be minimized by just sending a .jpg of the girl pic along with the Quark file that contains the special text and the layout. On the other hand, if you use Photoshop to create a .jpg of the whole layout and send that to your printing house, the file will be at least three times larger. And if you want to make any text or positioning changes to your image file, you will have to dig out the last good version of the Photoshop file, make your changes and then resave it as a final image file. Quark is clearly the winner in such situations. Consideration #2 - Special Effects On the other hand, you may not be able to easily pull your design off with Quark. For instance I have started using a lot of special text effects generated right in Photoshop -- bevels, shadows, outlines -- Sometimes these effects are very helpful when trying to make your text stand out against certain backgrounds. Here's an example...  You just can't do these type effects in a program like Quark. If you want to merge shadows and fades right into photographic backgrounds you pretty much have to use layers and then merge them into a single image. In this case your best bet is to send a high quality jpg of the file, and keep the .psd file handy in case you have to make any last minute changes. If you do, then make them at your end, and send another jpg. Rick Hendershot publishes Linknet News.
Linknet Business News provides daily business news summaries in article and RSS format.
|
|
|