Portraits of Africa

Within my photo series “Portraits of Africa” here is the image of a young African boy.

Portraits of Africa

I just love Black & White Photography and how it adds depth to a picture, especially portraits and expressive faces.

“Portraits of Africa” are shot on a simple NIKON Coolpix P90 with a minimum of post-editing, ideally nothing at all.

Best WP Design

Image handling for advanced visual effects is a difficult task for any coder since the first ambition remains to provide clean and valid code. Best WP Design by Semiomantics is experimenting with different solutions which are seen on static pages to integrate them into the dynamic frameworks of WP Best Themes from Semiomantics.

WP Best Design Carousel

The below presentation works fine on dynamic content. Use the mouse-wheel for fat image scrolling (place the cursor on an image). The presentation can be combined with zoom effects for magnification of individual images. This WP Best Design element can be used for product galleries, people galleries or any image. Enjoy.

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WP Best Design

Images as content and for visual effects can be dealt with in multiple ways. Depending on the purpose of the site we need to be flexible and provide to customers the most efficient technology in function of the purpose of the site and personal preferences.

Custom Designed WP Best Themes from Semiomantics provide flexible solutions without messing up scripts and code and serve perfectly the primary ambition which is high visibility and performance on search engines. The below slide show can be used on the front page, in pages and posts as well as in side bars, footers or headers.

WP Best Design for Image Handling Sample 1

A first example shows a slide show with a carousel on top and an info pane underneath the pictures. A timer lets you set the duration of display, transitions can be adapted to preferences.

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The Purpose of a Website

What is the purpose of a website? And why would you want to have a website if you can get free access to other people’s websites such as to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace,YouTube and others?

Expand your Business to the Internet

For businesses, the primary purpose of a website is to expand business and to mark a presence where existing and prospect customers can be met.  A website allows to bring the sales pipeline right in front of customers, allowing for 24/24 sales activity, follow up and product delivery (for digital products and automated services).

globalMove your mouse over image or click to enlarge

Best Kicks at Global Sports US

Build Brand Recognition and Notoriety

An important purpose of a website is to build and expand brand recognition. In a fast moving society where visual recognition is important, a permanent visual presence helps to build a reflex. For example: if you see TaxMartPro ads for online tax filing all over the place, the day you need their services, you remember the name and you will look for that company specifically to find the solution to your problem.

Preserve and impact on the Image of the Business – Goodwill

The reputation of a company is defined by what other people say about it. For any business it has become a must, not to abandon Image Building to third party comments, but to get involved in the process of steering the public perception of the business and it’s products, management and culture.

Communication with a market or a social environment

A website allows to reach out for new markets and to be available to potential customers in targeted environments, such as social networks.

Increase the level of service to customers

An important purpose of a website can be to allow 24/24 communication with customers, be it for follow-up and customer care services, support or to build conversation with interested parties concerning the company, the products or more. This last purpose provides companies with feed-back which can be analyzed and give a fair idea about perception and as the case may be popularity.

googlewaveMove your mouse over image or click to enlarge

Connect with Google Wave

Let other people build your business

An important purpose of a website can be to let other people build your business. The best example are Social Networks or Google. All the content, which is the essence is provided by the Members or Publishers, who also build the conversation, the traffic and who constitute the prospect leads at the same time.More traditional models, such as affiliate programs have the same purpose, however affiliates are paid in liquid for resulting sales or marketing efforts.

Decrease development cost and business expansion budgets

Building an online business structure is cheaper than building an offline shop down-town. Also, open source projects allow to achieve product development without development cost, since developers will contribute for free; examples: Google Wave, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more.

Decrease advertising cost

An interesting purpose of a website is to decrease advertising cost per sale. The internet revolution has entailed an advertising revolution. Everybody has the same chances to gain high visibility, using for example Google Ads or Search Engine Optimization. The cost is relatively small compared with the potential output.

Semiomantics and Ycademy offer purpose oriented website building

Semiomantics and Ycademy build customized purpose focused websites. While Semiomantics provides the technical services and infrastructure, Ycademy provides the educational component which allows interested parties to build their own sites or to commercialize similar services.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

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Surya Ray Profile and Image

We have been looking at Surya Ray to demonstrate the importance of getting in control of your online image. Of course it is impossible to achieve that goal completely, but one thing is sure: if you don’t build your profile, someone else will.

The profile is not just what you punch into profile pages from social networks and similar. It is what people perceive when surfing the net, it is the footprint you leave out there, it is what trackers may collect and interpret.

Large corporations and good marketers aim to control what pops up on Google Top 10 and eventually beyond.

Google Search returns can be of paramount importance. Or, as we say here: the first impression is the best, namely if it is a bad one!

When you search a company or a person to buy a product or a service or just by curiosity, you get Google’s search returns right in front of you and what you see there can influence you right away as it is something like the ‘first impression’.

Here is what Google returns as I write; please consider that my 3 entries there are the result of my conquest of Surya Rays Name Keyword since almost 24 hours, when I registered the domain suryaray.net.

On the first 2 spots you find LinkedIn, a third party program where Surya Ray has set up a public profile. This is fine, however Surya serves LinkedIn to generate traffic to their own site; the typical give and take between users and ‘free’ programs.

On rank 3, you find a Company, carrying the same name and which owns the .com domain.

On rank 4 there is an image damaging ‘Fraud Alert’, I would prefer to get rid of.

Surya Ray Image on Google

Finally, have a look at the top right Google Ad; the kind of generic ad which automatically grabs search terms and drives traffic to Facebook. Following the link, I land on my Facebook page (as I am logged in, where I type into the search “Ray Surya” as suggested by the Google Ad.

Surprise, surprise … here I am again :-).

Surya Ray on the Facebook Search

( The screen shot features my new Facebook Timeline Profile as available in developers mode).

On all the above links exposed, be it on Google or on Facebook, we never end up on a site belonging to Surya – his image is in the hand of third parties.

Yet another place we can examine for impact is the Google Image Search. Here Surya Ray’s Image is well present on the top 20 (red footprints), however, look at the images picked by Google from my website (green footprints)?

Surya Ray Image on Google

Smashing, no?

Of course we can d a test with an image of Surya (I hope you don’t mind Surya, I pinched your profile pic from a social network, thanks.). For the purpose of the exercise I converted the pic into a black and white version to recognize it easily.

Surya Ray Image

We will trace the Photo and see if it makes it into Google and where :-).

The internet is not just limited to social networks. People continue to look up other people on Google and the search returns impact heavily on our performance. If our profiles are present only through social networks where you have to login before being able to click on your target’s site link or contact, you lose already loads of traffic. The free service is provided in exchange of one of your most precious assets: Your TRAFFIC!

Marketing is about ‘findability’ and creating visibility in the target market with the purpose to convert traffic to sales, clicks to customers and bits to cash. Selling from someone elses website (social networks) is not ideal, your own site (or shop) inspires more credibility and professionalism.

Clicking all day on social network content to generate visibility is time-consuming, often inefficient and producing mainly cyber-waste.

Building a high performance website is much cheaper than wasting your time on building a social profile with so-called social activity. I am not saying that you should not be socially active, but in a targeted and efficient way.

The fact to climb Google Top 10 saves money (think about the alternative: Google Ads: don’t even think about achieving anything substantial below $20 a day, rather $100). Also a well-connected website optimized for Search Engines and Social Networks will free your time you have been wasting on useless social activity just for the pleasure of tracking programs and for the benefit of social networks for whom you build the main assets, traffic and content, instead of building your own wealth.

More soon.

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at New Photo Publishing Hack.

Sometimes a plain photo or image is rather boring and makes no impact at all. Just by adding a border to a photo or image gives it a complete lift and adds a new dimension.

Add a border using Gimp

Here are some examples of borders using a free photo/image editor like Gimp. These require no technical skills, just a few simple mouse clicks hence easy to use by anyone.

For this example I have chosen a photo of a dragonfly, caught firmly on my washing. As you can see it is a plain photo, just catching the moment.  

Dragonfly

Opening the Gimp editor I opened the image I want to use and then selected ‘Filter’ and then selected ‘Decor’. By using the ‘Add a Border’  and making a few adjustments this changed the dimension of the photo.

Dragonfly with border

Re-using this new image of the dragonfly with a border I again  selected ‘Border’ and created a green border around it. A border within a border.

Dragonfly with green border

The more you experiment with the editor the easier it gets. Heres another example of just playing around with the editor.

Dragonfly playtime

Web Design Workshop 18 Image Filters

Filtering images allows to change the look and feel of an image with just a few mouse clicks. While a few filters can be applied via CSS, I don’t really recommend it as they will not work in all browsers and if you load the corresponding code for 3 browser types, your code will not validate as two of them are proprietary stuff. In as much as I am concerned I just use opacity elements and code them for IE and FF in rare cases.

Let’s look at what some of the most popular filters do to a picture:

1. The Picture

The Marble Stadium by Night

2. Blueprint

3. Bronze

4.Cartoon

5. Color Rotate

6. Color Rotate 2

7. Color Sketch

8. Animation

9. Grayscale

10. Inkstamp

11. Neon

12. Pixelate

13. Popart

14. Sepia

15. Soften

16. Tint

Join tonight’s Web Design Workshop at yorGOtalk to learn how to quickly implement filters.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

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Daily Online Training Call

Tuesday 6th October

Creating a Static Background on a blog

A whole training call focused on resizing a large background image in order to use it as a static background on a blog. An image was provided for this purpose, a photo of the ‘Marble Stadium in Athens’.

Training Call Workshop

The workshop gave the participants the opportunity to put into practice the instruction on resizing the image and also work with the stylesheet to make the neccessary changes to obtain a result.

Once the concept is understood then any image can be utilised as a static background, as in this example below of a grunge background incorporated in Yorgo’s design blog.

Grunge Background

An example below of the ‘Marble Stadium, Athens’ photo used as a background on the Web Design blog during a training call.

Static background image

As the reader scrolls down the page, the background image remains firmly in place on the screen.

For recordings of the training:

Daily Online Training call recording

For more information about the Daily Online Training calls click here.

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Web Design Workshop 17 – Resizing Large Background Image

Web Design Workshop 17 follows Workshop 16 where we discussed scrolling content over fixed backgrounds. Using large images and pictures as backgrounds, we need to pay particular attention to the concerned file size.

Large Background Image Marble Stadium

For the purpose of this exercise let’s use a photograph of the Marble Stadium which has been constructed for the 1896 Olympics in Athens.

Marble Stadium Athens

The original file is quite large with 2048 x 1536 pixels. This is the dimension we want to load to the Semiomantics XO as background image to allow visitors using resolutions up to 2048 to have a background in one piece.

A picture of this dimension comes usually with 3.5 to 4.5 MB from the camera to the computer.

Download Background Image

Download the image HERE. It is already reduced to about 800 KB, which is still much too big to serve as a background.

Save to disk and decompress the file.

Edit the image in Gimp or Photoshop

First let’s give it a long shut and save with 20% quality settings, and all other parameters optimized for smallest file output:

Gimp Settings

With Photoshop you get a similar result:

Photoshop Settings

With both above settings you end up with a weight of about 105 KB.

Compare the details:

Sample from 800 KB picture:

Sample Marble Stadium

Sample from 105 KB Image:

Sample 1 Marble Stadium

How about reducing further? Yes, we can!

Use a blur filter such as Gauss set to 2.5 and you end up with 62 KB only; see the detail:

Gaussian Blur

Of course this blur and reduction of quality may be extreme; however a blur factor of 0.5 to 1.00 could make sense as blur optically sends the background back and helps to put more emphasis on the foreground (your content) provided your content images are sharp …:-).

Example: Blur 2.0 but 30% quality output:

30 pct with 2.0 Blur

Wow, this his is a lean 79 KB! Click a few times on the pic till you get full size.

Apply the Background to the Site

Let’s load the image to our image folder in the Semiomantics XO theme folder and adapt the style sheet.

My image is called marble1300.jpg and I want it to be fixed so that the content can scroll over it:

body {
background: #000000 url(images/marble1300.jpg) repeat-x;
background-attachment: fixed;
margin: 0 auto;
font-size: 14px;
padding: 0;
}

This is what I get on my 1680 x 1050 resolution monitor (click to view in overlay):

As I would like to see more of the stadium and place my site “into” the stadium, I cut off 250 pixels about from the top of the image whic reduces the image size by a few pixels and I reload it to get my final result:

Background Image size 2048 x 1300 pixels and 76.1 KB, that’s over 10 times lighter than the original.

Have a look at the site for as long as these background settings are loaded HERE.

Ycademy Web Design Workshop

Join tonight’s Ycademy Web Design Workshop for your customized implementation.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Superyacht OXI ZEN.

Miss Garden Route Images

We just received the fiirst images from the Miss Garden Route 2009 contest. Have a look, the new Miss Garden Route and Klein Karoo is amongst them! And we shoot them up to Google Top 10 Images!

The first Images from Miss Garden route 2009 Contest

Miss Garden Route 2009 Images

[Show as slideshow]

12►

Let’s look forward for more later!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Paul Allen Provocative Image.

Web Design Seminar by Ycademy

Saturday and Sunday September 26-27, 2009

1 pm – 9 pm GMT (London Time)

At Ycademy Online Seminar Conferencing

DAY 1

1.Web Design Basic Elements

2. Branding

3. Workshop: Your Brand Elements

4. Workshop: Implementation with Semiomantics XO

5. Information Architecture vs. Site Architecture

6. Workshop: Personal Project, Style and Web Design Elements

7. Workshop: Implementation

8. Extract Brand Elements

9. Workshop: Apply to NewsCast script.

END OF DAY 1

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

51 Grunge Fonts

For the purpose of the Web design Workshop here are 51 Grunge Fonts you may want to download and install on your computer (Windows). These grunge fonts allow you to easily add grunge style text to your design.

If you have downloaded the Mega Font pack, most of these fonts are contained in there; you may just overwrite or skip the corresponding files when installing.

Download Grunge Fonts

Download from HERE. (Download size: 9.4 MB)

Grunge Fonts 2

How to install Fonts

1. Unzip the downloaded folder

2. Select all the contained .ttf files and copy them into the folder:

Windows/Fonts  on your main hard drive (usually on drive C).

Done

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

As we are in layer mask mode these days, I was asked as to how to fade one image into another in Adobe Photoshop as I quickly did on this orange butterfly photo taken in my garden yesterday. Yes – we are having an early spring down here in Noordhoek, South Africa. This was the first butterfly of its kind I’ve spotted since our winter… shimmering just too beautifully in the early morning sun on a stunning white raphiolepsis in full bloom. Ideal for the creation of some captivating web graphics!

If you look at the digital photo above, you see there is a part in full colors (at the top) fading perfectly into a gold-tinted part (at the bottom) – in this case featuring the same butterfly image.

How to fade one image into another

So what have I done to fade one image into another in an almost unnoticeable elegant manner?

First, I had a vision: I knew that I wanted to play with the orange of the butterfly fading into golden tones… So, what I needed was part of the image – containing the striking orange butterfly – in original colors… and the rest of the same picture tinted in golden tones.

As I had the original in colors, my second step was to do the tinting process in Adobe Photoshop (Image > Image Adjustments > Color balance and >Hue… alternatively Filter Tools). I also did black and white essays to see my values – meaning the amount of light and shadow as well as the greys inbetween in the picture… which always interest me as a lover of monochromatic photography. You can play with any color you like and that suits your purpose.

So in my layer stack I now had my original color picture and, on top of it, the golden version. That’s all… and now I went for step 3: the layer mask!

How to apply a Layer Mask

There are various ways as to how to apply a Layer Mask; I tend to keep it simple: with the top golden layer selected, I click on the “Add Layer Mask” icon at the bottom of the layer tool… I make sure that black is my foreground color… I click on the gradient tool in the toolbox to the left and, at the top, on the menu bar, I make sure that the first box is clicked for ‘linear fades’ and that, on the Gradient Editor next to it (just open it), the black-to-white gradient is selected.

Notice: the moment you click on the Layer Mask, a little white thumbnail is added to your active layer – so make sure you select the correct layer!

Here’s an important principle to remember: white makes your image opaque (keeps it non-transparent), black makes it transparent (the underlying image shines through).

So remember: I wanted to keep the top of the color original (bottom layer) and then get rid of the rest to fade into the gold image (top layer with layer mask).

In other words: I wanted the gold image not to show at the top (where I wanted the orange butterfly), yet I wanted it to become visible just beyond that. As I had the gold layer active, this principle applied to that layer: do not show the top (black, meaning transparent to reveal the underlying image layer with the butterfly) but show bottom (white, meaning there the gold picture was opaque with nothing from the color picture underneath showing).

As the next step I had to decide the amount of gradient I wanted to apply and from what direction (black to white).  This was dictated by the shape of the orange butterfly… so I basically ‘drew’ this gradient in form of a straight line with my mouse, holding it down all the way, from top left towards roughly the middle of the image… a little as on the schema below for better understanding.

The result is what you see at the top – and I think it has quite a nice vintage look to it.

Just try doing the same with an image of your’s. You can obviously work with two images – but this exercise is kept simple to show the principle. It just needs a little understanding, practice and – most importantly – knowing what effect or result you wish to achieve. But this too comes with practice – so practice is the key!

If you have a problem, just go back in the History (see under Window)… and start again until “it’s in the bag”!

Let me know if this was helpful… and enjoy!

Almost a year ago, I wrote about the Arum Lily Frog – Hyperolius horstockii – and how much I wished to spot it! Yesterday, a tiny arum lily frog surprised us at the Photo Seminar attended by Ycademy Seminar participants from all over the world – strictly online of course!

Curiosity won over suspicion as the beautiful creature emerged from the depth of the calice of a white arum lily in my traditional monthly Ycademy Seminar bouquet that always features flowers from my garden in Noordhoek, South Africa.

Arum Lily Frog at Photo Seminar

Having an Arum Lily Frog at the Photo Seminar gave me an instant opportunity to capture the little visitor with my digital camera (NIKON Coolpix P90)… and then applying the newly learned skills of OnOne Professional Tools as part of our Adobe Photoshop photo and image editing equipment.

The Importance of Seeing beyond the Photo

My article about “The Importance of Seeing beyond the Photo” suddenly got an additional dimension: the arum lily frog perspective! The knowledge and content taught in terms of Photo Editing and Photo Publishing were exhilarating as to the possibilities we have for our photo post-production, allowing us to compensate for the short-comings of our low-end cameras that just cannot compare with top professional digital camera equipment when it comes to traditonal offline printing.

It was – as always – so much that it could make you dizzy and one could easily get lost between Greek walls and British bumble-bees. Finally, the traffic chaos on Google Top 10 after us publishing images on our WordPress Blogs was just too much: our little visitor prefered to withdraw from the high-tech world … while keeping an eye on me … just in case!

Publishing Photos on Google Top 10

Publishing Photos on Google Top 10  convinced the Arum Lily Frog that it had indeed joined the best WordPress Theme Team in the world: Semiomantics.

Time to enjoy the last rays of the setting Noordhoek winter sun illuminating the arum lily… time to rest before the next adventure…

Publishing Photos on Google Top 10 was the crowning moment of last month’s Ycademy Seminar which focused entirely on smart Image Editing and targeted Image Publishing on WordPress based Semiomantics Websites and Blogs. Results were almost instant for the entire Seminar Team – with top rankings on Google ahead of 19,300,000 search returns – as can be seen on the below screenshot taken just a few moments after publishing my image here on my Author Blog:

Publishing Photos on Google Top 10

Publishing Photos on Google Top 10 is becoming an increasingly important target following the rapid online trend where the emphasis is on media, media design, media publishing and anything to do with images, photos, videos and the visual in general. As offline so online one could say… and while the above results are in constant flux all the time, we have once again prooved the high performance of the best WP based theme in connection with Semiomantics Web Design!

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Arum Lily Frog.