JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for June, 2007

All the web sites we cre­ate are cre­ative to vary­ing degrees. Clients that are in par­tic­u­lar indus­tries need a more cre­ative site than oth­ers. For exam­ple, Gre­gory Col­lett, actor, required not only a graph­i­cal cre­ative web site but he also needed a show­case of his work, both print and film. This require­ment brought some chal­lenges and, in my opin­ion, won­der­ful results.

For exam­ple, his still pic­tures needed to be dis­played with some­thing more than just thumb­nails that you click on to make them larger. So we used a script and cre­ated this photo gallery:

You don’t really see the ‘beauty’ of this until you start to look at the pho­tos. First you can pick the cat­e­gory from the drop down side menu (series). When you land on the page it is on Bas­ket­ball and Soc­cer. Now if you take a pic­ture and drag it up the larger area it shows the larger photo with the small thumb at the side. Try another — again the larger pic­ture in the main area and small thumb at the side. To see other types of still pho­tos just click on the drop down box and dif­fer­ent images appear.

Photo and move reels is a page with thumb nails of movies Gre­gory have done. See here. There are thumb nails that when clicked on take you to a new page with some stills show­cased, or in the exam­ple of Bor­ing Or, for exam­ple, you can also click on ‘movie reels’ and see a sam­ple of the film.

Of course the resume rounds out the actors portfolio.

It’s chal­leng­ing and fun to do a cre­ative site like this for actor Gre­gory Collett.

I will show you a dif­fer­ent one next time.

Click here to view our gallery of web sites we have created.

Jan

What is an alt tag, you may ask — well an alt tag is a text descrip­tion for images.

There are two impor­tant rea­sons to use alt tags.

1. Acces­si­bil­ity for vision-imparied vis­i­tors. The soft­ware will be able to describe to the user what they can’t see.

2. Search engines can­not see images but the can read the con­tent that describes the image.
This is an exam­ple of how you would use it:

img alt=“description of image and do use key­words if appro­pri­ate for the par­tic­u­lar image” src=imagename.jpg” (Do make sure you put this inbe­tween < > If I try to do this it says the image is not valid

Hav­ing said that, don’t key­word stuff your alt tag. That will hurt you more than help you. Just be rea­son­able and ensure the keyword(s) you use rep­re­sent the image and the sub­ject mat­ter of the page.

Read more arti­cles here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html

Jan

The say­ing “don’t put all your eggs in one bas­ket” comes to mind IF you depend solely on Google searches. With con­stant changes in their algo­rithm you can be listed on the first page one day and the 1000 page a month later. No don’t get dis­cour­aged, some­times it is a shift that will be adjusted and you will see your­self back in that spot, other times it is web­site own­ers who are work­ing their sites and it starts to pay off, or.…

Work Your Site?

Yep! As much as it would be nice to just upload the site and wait for traf­fic that is just not going to happen.

First — focus. Take a broad key phrase and nar­row it. As an exam­ple, as a web designer if I type in ‘web site design’ in Google I get 1,090,000,000 results . Being found for ‘web site design’ is so broad I would be lucky (to say the least) if I was in the top 10. But nar­row it down to ‘web designer Canada’ I get 126,000,000 results. Yes of course still daunt­ing, and this is not what I tar­get for, but you can see what I am saying.

So yes absolutely work your site for search engine searches but don’t rely on them com­pletely. You need to work your web­site and that means start­ing a blog (or two), sub­mit arti­cles, social net­work­ing, etc.

Read more about this and other infor­ma­tive arti­cles here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html

Jan

We have been on a search for land at Sec­ond Life and have finally bought land!

Our goal to buy land is to build a busi­ness for my com­pany and help my clients build a busi­ness in Sec­ond Life. There are many busi­nesses and com­pa­nies in Sec­ond Life and I know this will con­tinue to grow.

Of course we want to adver­tise, but since we are new and just ‘found land’, one thing we did was cre­ate a tshirt with our com­pany info, logo and web site address on it — we wear our advertising.

Here’s a pic:

To do this you need to cre­ate a tex­ture on a basic shirt. Here is what the tex­ture looks like when you upload it to Sec­ond Life:

Of course there are many dif­fer­ent ways to adver­tise, which we are going to do, once we get a shop built. For now this is a start.

Are you inter­ested in mar­ket­ing in Sec­ond Life? Click here to read more.

If you are not a mem­ber and want to join Sec­ond Life? Click here . Do say HI when you join!

Jan

I have talked about my ‘quest’ to buy land in Sec­ond Life and build a busi­ness, for myself and to help my clients, and my ‘quest’ has taken a nice turn. I finally found some land in Sec­ond Life.

Read more about it here:

http://secondlifesnippets.com/