...In the Loop

Building Your Site with a Free Web Design

Creating a website is a multi-faceted venture. It entails not only laying-out a user-friendly structure for ease of navigation and content retrieval; you also have to be thoughtful about the elements and coordination of styles and colors on the pages visible to its users.

While web design is basically putting online what you could have done on print less the control functions and a real-time interactive pace that you cannot achieve through print, it still draws heavily from the same aesthetic concepts in terms of color, balance, and content distribution that is important to always consider end-user assessment prior to implementing structures and use of particular design sets.

The complexity levels at which coordination and coding are at usually depends on the size of your site and the functions that you would like to offer to your users. Hence, for more complex functions, you might need a web developer who has both advanced skills and years of experience plus lots of creativity. But if you are building a small-scale website with just the regular functions and controls, you can actually cut-off on your costs by availing of free web designs that are offered in design communities and blog networks.

Here are some reasons why you should take advantage of the design freebies:

• Make your site look professional. Most professional web designers actually put up sample designs and give them away for free for study and promotional purposes. By using their designs, you are actually marketing on their behalf and your user-experience and feedbacks from your users actually can help them create even better and stronger designs.

• Loose graphic elements such as logos, bullets, backgrounds, navigation buttons, section dividers, and tons of free images are offered by individual and networked graphic designers. There are stock images that are totally free to use, some only ask for a one-time pay, and some ask for royalties on commercial usage. Look for royalty-free images and totally free images when wanting to use specific elements.

• Built-in and add-on free web design sets install in minutes of activation. They save you a lot of time, money, and effort, and you don’t even have to mess up with the codes and style sheets—you just press option buttons.

How to Get Ahead of Inflation

Wikipedia says economists define inflation as the rise in the general level of prices of goods and services over a period of time, due to rise in oil prices, too much money supply and the lack of commodities. It devalues the purchasing power of your money. Inflation is constant, it is inherent in all economies and since you can’t fight it, at least you need to get ahead of it.

Here are tips on how to get ahead of inflation.

• Track and control what you’re spending. Cut on unnecessary expenses, avail of promotions and coupon deals when possible. Know the differences between your needs and wants and focus less on the latter.

• Increase your sources of income. This is where some of us experience a little bit of difficulty. Take a second job if you can or better yet, monetize your hobbies. Venturing on a business is also a good idea.

• Save and invest in assets with high yield. This is the best way to get ahead of inflation. Investing in assets with yields higher than the inflation rate maintains and even increases your moneys purchasing power.

How to Create Business Cards in MS Word

Did you know that you can actually create your own business card at the comfort of your own home or office? All you need is a little creativity, a quality card stock, your computer, a good colored printer, and a paper cutter.

Don’t worry if you’re not very techie or if you don’t have any design software such as those from PSD or InDesign, you can use your MS Word instead!

Right! If you go to your MS Word and open a NEW document, you can do the following:

1. Select: Mailings > Labels

2. On the Address field, enter your information.

3. Click Options and select an appropriate size for your Business Card such as a Horizontal Card.

4. Click New Document and add some graphics and style into the card.

5. Print onto cardstock or pre-perforated business card paper.

Done! Fast and easy, isn’t it?

4 Useful Tools when Working with Images and Pictures

With today’s technology and tools, we have almost everything at the click of a few buttons—even what used to be activities restricted to skilled laborers like paper printers and layout artists such as the production of brochures and marketing folios.

Photo editing has also become easy and less technical. Here are a few softwares and online programs which I find very interesting and useful in many of my projects:

MS Paint – the good old drawing pad for bitmap pictures and drawings

InDesign – a highly flexible and accomodating software for laying out pages into newsletters, pamphlets, and other kinds of promotional materials

PicasaWeb– Google’s online photo storage gallery, allows you to synchronize albums between your web account and your computer

Picnik – If you’d like to have fun and be creative, or enhance your photos just as if they were pro shots, this online tool is definitely very cool

Fun Ways to Recycle Old Photos

Time and again, we keep old photographs in our memory boxes and albums. A lot of times, they are just stuck in the basement or the attic. Come spring cleaning time, we stumble upon them and recollect. But just before you put those pixies back into surreal oblivion, consider having some good use for them.

Scanning the images surely would be one of the few things that can get into your brain right now and you might want to upload them to your family geneaology webpage for old times’ sake, but did you know that you can actually use them for some fun art projects that your kids will surely enjoy?

1. Framed Collages – Pick out several photos that can be made into a collage for display in your living room. Aside that they can make good conversation pieces, the children will surely be happy to know of your childhood and remote past.

2. Postcard Printing – by scanning the images and working on them with Photoshop or some other digital editing software, you can make wonderful postcards that have a vintage feel.

3. Digital Scrapbook – Aside from the usual paper bound scrapbook, old photos make for great elements in digital scrapbooking.

They are not only fun, you can also do them at home with your kids for some quality time. 

Photo courtesy of chthn.

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Express Yourself Better through Digitally Printed Fabrics

Digital printing technology for fabrics has existed since the last decade and a half, but maybe has not yet gone as popular as a mass technology.

Screen printing has still strongly dominated the
market for customized fabric printing, due to a larger scale of customers demanding for more complex prints. The advantage however of digital printing over the manually processed prints are the pocesses color application, with enphasis on the tonal attributes of color and graphic design through the aid of color management softwares.

Shadows, reflection, moire, shimmers, and translucence, which may not be adeptly figured in a manually printed textile, are just some of what the digital fabric printing technology can afford for its users.

Photo courtesy of gadl.

Going Digitally Green

With the development of new technology, environmentalists have become increasingly concerned about their effects towards nature.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/csatch/

For the ordinary citizen, the most common concern is how solid wastes are managed. For decades and decades now, people have been clamoring about the 3R's: reduce, reuse, and recycle.

On one big hand, going digital means needing to use less paper products. On the other hand, the benefits and attributes of printed material cannot yet be foregone in the current everyday scenario.

While we are able to process our photographs and documents digitally, there are just a lot of times that we desire or need to get them in print. Well, there might only be a few in your area who can outrightly claim to go green, so if you’d like to feel a little less guilty about it, background check.
Up online things are easier to find and you can always check business profiles before you get your photos or documents processed by a digital printing company to see if they adhere to green policies and use either recycled and biodegradable stuff for their products.

Cat on Printer, courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/mava/

 

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Facebook Makes it to Forbes

Apart from hitting the box office list with “The Social Network”, Facebook also made it on Forbes’ list. The six founders of the famed social networking site are listed on Forbes’ yearly compilation of the world’s top billionaires.

At #52 Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, with $13.5 billion estimated worth. Fellow co-founder included on Forbes is Dustin Moskovitz, along with investors Peter Thiel, Sean Parker, and Yuri Milner.

Who would’ve thought that from a Harvard dorm room, these college students will be able to create the world’s infamous social networking site and outstripping its competition MySpace and Friendster.

Photo Courtesy of deneyterrio

 

World's Smallest Waterproof MP3 Player

If you are the type of person who loves cute and handy gadgets, then this is good news for you! And I’m pretty sure that if you are one persona who enjoys listening to music you will be dying to have one of these UwaterG2 World’s Smallest Waterproof MP3 Players in your collection.

Yes! It is the latest craze in town not just because it is lightweight (just 0.4 x 1.75 inches and weighting a mere ounce), cute and trendy, it is also waterproof., so you can still listen to your fave song even if you are 10 feet below the sea.

Here’s more! And I’m sure you will be rushing to buy or replace your iPod shuffle now if you will know that it’s the cheapest among MP3 players out there, “as it’s making the discount rounds at around $20, down from a list price of $79.95”.

This cool gadget is the latest innovation of Fitness Technologies which boasts of added features including; 2BG memory, earphones lock seal, a headband and a belt clip. Plus this is also available in five different colors; black, black/blue, black/yellow, black/red, and ice white.
Indeed exciting things come in small packages!

 

Spreading the Green Printing Method for a Greener Future

We are all aware on what’s happening now to our environment and that we must all need to work together for a greener future before it’s too late for all of us.

Among the industries that have put their feet forward for a greener environment is the printing industry. Printing services have campaigned going green from their printing methods up to their packaging. Environmental-friendly resources are being used as alternatives to achieve high quality prints. So, the idea of trees being cut down just to satisfy several corporations’ print requirements is a thing of the past.

The huge difference between green printing and the previous method of printing is the resources. Instead of using the usual petroleum-based ink, green printing makes use of soy inks. And in order to conserve more trees, instead of using new materials as canvases for printing, recycled paper is used instead. There are also pulp-based papers and synthetic papers which are perfect for creating digital prints because of their durability and environment friendly qualities. Non-toxic toners applied not only help create exceptional quality digital prints but it has less chemical wastes.
More and more digital printing company are now switching to green printing technique, but still very few people know about it. So, it’s time that we use the web to spread such worthy news to everyone in order for us to reach a greener future.

Source:  http://jointhunter.jimdo.com/2011/02/18/spreading-the-green-printing-method-for-a-greener-future/