Creative Storefront» Featured

CS Logo Type Study (how to brand ourselves)

Tim Johnson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:56:54 +0000

I have been thrilled to be a part Creative Storefront and be able to garner tips, tricks and advice and perspective from all the great talent that has showed up. However being from a graphic design background I just couldn’t sit back and not contribute to the branding and design of the site. I mean what is “Glow Theme”? So (w/ apologies to Zoey Setiawan) I have done some type / logo studies that I am posting here in hopes that they generate some discussion among our members and players.

These are quick studies in script fonts, scale and emphasis of the operative word. When I think of Creative Storefront I keep coming back to the strip mall, aluminum door and window frames with the templated style signage in front. Think sheet metal, cables and house paint.

The last 4 are using a German utilitarian font Din Schriften. These work the best for me as they are clean, simple, clear and the font treatments lends itself to variety of signage and background treatments.

The very last one works best overall for me. I can see the background treatment being easily extended and/or tweaked to work through out site as headers and buttons.

WordPress Tutorial: Uploading Large Files

Bradley Charbonneau — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:38:44 +0000

Depending on your hosting environment, you may have run into time-outs or errors when trying to upload large files in WordPress. It might be solved by a php.ini or .htaccess file edit, but that’s if you know how to do those things and even then it might not work. Of course, you could upload using any FTP program, but that’s again assuming you know how to do that. I wanted to stick with WordPress and get the job done. I used two plugins: myFTP and Add from Server. The video shows how it works.

WordPress site in two (or more) languages

Bradley Charbonneau — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:51:48 +0000

I have a site in English and I need the same site in Spanish. Hmm. Before I just dive in, I’m thinking of my options.

Categories (Spanish / English and then subcategories for each; sidebar content (posts/pages) based on which category we’re in)
Pages: similar to categories: pages with sub-pages for each language
Google Translate: some sort of on-the-fly translation tool … ?
Duplicate WP install: a whole separate WP install for the Spanish site?

What have you done?

Free photos for your blog

Laurie McAndish King — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:33:33 +0000

Need images to illustrate your posts? Here are some sources for free photos. Be sure to check usage terms and conditions on these sites: some provide both free and low-cost photos, are free for personal use only, or require registration. Also, be sure to and credit the source appropriately.

Morgue file contains free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use
TheFreeSite.com links to multiple sites for photos and graphics
Stock.xchng.com “the leading FREE stock photo site!”
FreeLargePhotos.com good for travel images
Free Photos for your Blog includes a long list of sources, including nature photography and background textures
FreePixels.com 3800 images in 40 categories, including travel, people, nature, architecture, backgrounds and textures
FreePhotosBank also provides free speaking characters for your website
Free Stock Photo Resources another long list of links
PhotoshopSupport.com lists multiple sources
The Clipart Site includes photos
Wikipedia’s public domain image resources

Also, please note that I have not personally vetted all these sources, so, while I believe they are all legitimate, I cannot make any guarantees. Let us know if you have other sources.

You got Flickr in my Facebook

Bradley Charbonneau — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:43:47 +0000

I was trying to remember that old Reese’s ad and, well, with the In-ter-net it was gall-darn-easy (you got peanut butter in my chocolate). Have I ever mentioned I’m a total Reese’s fanatic?

So I get this question quite a bit:

“I have photos on my Facebook page, but I want them on my website, too. Can I import them or something?”

I’m not a heavy Facebook user so I didn’t know the WordPress or Flickr plugins off the top of my head, but a quick look at the WordPress plugin directory and there were plenty to choose from. But that’s assuming they’re using Facebook and WordPress. Sure, my clients are, but if you’re not, I’d suggest using a photo-sharing site like Flickr and then integrating those images into Facebook. Why? Because Flickr (or Picasa or others) do a great job at one simple task: photos. Because they’re so popular, usually they’ll have friendly export/import/integration/plugins to help you get your photos elsewhere.

So then you could integrate your Flickr photos into your Facebook page, your MySpace page, your website (with WordPress or something else) or even just use Flickr on its own for photos.

How do you get your peanut butter in your chocolate?

How SF Softball updates their schedules, standings, and teams

Bradley Charbonneau — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:11:36 +0000

The Problem

The San Francisco Adult Municipal Softball League (sfsoftball.com) had a website, regular updates, images, banners, and text. Sounds good, right? The trouble was that the updates were too difficult and time consuming to do. They had to learn a certain program and for those who didn’t know that program, updates were difficult if not impossible.

The Solution

Enter Likoma and WordPress. Likoma, a website design shop here in San Francisco, uses only content management systems to build websites. In fact, they use exclusively WordPress. With WordPress installed, SF Softball can now update their game schedules, rain-outs, score tables, and pretty much anything else on the site with a simple “Microsoft Word-like” interface. Now anyone with an Internet connection can update the site easily, efficiently, and without hours of complex training.

The Benefit

SF Softball’s teams, players, and fans now have much more immediate results on their site. WordPress is free, so they no longer have to pay for any software they used to update the old site. More people in the administration of the league can edit more content on the pages asking fewer people for help. By the way, the site got a new coat of paint and looks slick. Have a look: sfsoftball.com.

So we have this publishing platform. Now what?

Bradley Charbonneau — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:34:41 +0000

Chris Brogan wrote “How to Think Of Blog Posts” just when I was thinking about what to put into our new-found site here. He has a list of 9 items that are all good, but I couldn’t get past his first one as I get so many questions on a daily basis it would take me four months to just write blog posts that answered questions. THEN I could move onto something fun like random photos!

1. Answer questions. You get emails with people asking you for your thoughts on X. Write the post instead of just replying to the email.

One I would add is to add (value) to something you read/learned/saw/experienced. For example, I ran across this post called “FeedBurner RSS-to-Email Hack” that talked about getting ads into your RSS feed (to email). I wasn’t really interested in the ads part of the topic, but I was interested in getting my RSS feed into something more manageable than FeedBurner. So I could write a post about how that would work.

I’ll get on that …

Got a blog? Do this simple thing to boost your readership. (dougbelshaw.com)
MailChimp’s Guide for Bloggers (mailchimp.com)
Leveraging Your Blog to Promote Your Services (freelanceswitch.com)

WordPress Tutorial (2.8.4) Statistics and Keywords

Bradley Charbonneau — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:19:29 +0000

Overview of the dashboard stats and then deeper statistics provided by the wordpress.com stats plugin. Quickly go over the different areas of the stats (Referrers, Top Posts & Pages, Search Engine Terms, Clicks, and Incoming Links) and then a bit of analysis of the keywords. Finally, a very brief example of how to put those keywords to use in a particular post using the All-in-One SEO plugin.

Mail Chimp: 500 Subscribers and 5,000 email per month. Free? What’s the catch?

Bradley Charbonneau — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:27:30 +0000

I’ve been using Vertical Response for some time and although it still works just great, I’ve been testing out Mail Chimp and so far: I like.

Great stats, easy-to-use editor to create your newsletter, love the backend interface, and, well, yeah, funny monkeys hanging around. Also, like Vertical Response, they don’t force you to do a monthly plan, but you can pay per recipient only when you send a newsletter.

September 2009 Update: They changed their pricing around a bit and now you can have up to 500 subscribers for free (max 5,000 emails sent out per month). Wow, can’t be that. They also have handy help videos to walk you through the steps to send an email, manage a list, and everything else you’d want to do. They also have auto-responders and after the video I realized: I should use auto-responders …

Use my affiliate link here and you’ll get a discount.