Wednesday 15 July 2015

Stop the world, I want to get off! Throw Pillows

Featured Product!

A gorgeous design. Click to customize and personalize. Maybe you'd like to see your name or initials on it?


tagged with: scrmlghs, bewildered faces, staring eyes, screaming, scream, mad eyes, interlocking faces, interwoven faces, zany fun, hrfptraz

Fun series A bright, fun painting featuring a mass of jumbled up and interwoven staring eyes, screaming mouths and bewildered faces.Pace of life too manic? If you feel like you want the world to stop, so you can get off, then this design is for you!
more items with this image
more items in the Fun series

image code: scrmlghs

»visit the HightonRidley store for more designs and products like this
The Zazzle Promise: We promise 100% satisfaction. If you don't absolutely love it, we'll take it back!

Auto Car on Brushed Steel - Sportscar template Double-Sided Standard Business Cards (Pack Of 100)

A gorgeous best-selling design. Click to customize or personalize. How would it look with your name or monogram on it - why not have a look-see right now?


tagged with: business card template, metallic style, sportscars, autotrade, hrbstslr genbct1a, car logo, metallic look, steel autos, luxury car rental, luxury auto rental, automotive, chrome look, metal look

Metallic series A great business card template for the Auto trade. Just upload your logo or use the Sports Auto provided. Then customise with your details and give a strap line, quote or personal message for that really professional feel.
more items in the Metallic series
This business card template with other artwork


»visit the HightonRidley store for more designs and products like this

ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Buddies

Blogging with purpose

original post »

Let’s kick off this new week of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog with a podcast about finding your tribe.

I’m an introvert, and blogging and podcasting work really well with my personality type. I enjoy interacting with others, but at a bit of a distance. But one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over 13 years in this business is that sometimes I have to push myself out of my comfort zone and be among people, because it’s then that my blogs grow best.

In my first few weeks of blogging when I had no idea what I was doing, I realised the value of having a helping hand in other bloggers. Their support is indispensable, especially when you feel as though you’re not getting anywhere, or you’re better off doing something else with your time.

In today’s episode I go through the challenges I’ve faced over the years and how the presence of other bloggers have helped me. I’ve achieved so much more as a result of collaboration and reaching out to others, so I’ve a few ideas to share about how they help and why you should find yourself a friend or two to make this online journey with.

It’s probably pretty obvious, but today’s challenge is to find a blog buddy or buddies. That might not be as easy as you think, so I’m on hand to give some advice about how you might like to go about this.

ProBlogger Podcast Avatar

Click here to listen to day 15 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series on the ProBlogger Podcast. 

 Further Reading:

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Build a Better Blog in 31 Days

ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Buddies

The post ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Buddies appeared first on @ProBlogger.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Build a Better Blog in 31 Days

ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Buddies

The post ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Buddies appeared first on @ProBlogger.


 #bloggingtips 

Cecilia Levy Produces Eggshell-Thin Cups and Saucers Out of Spiderman Comics and Century-Old Books

Fun and Random

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Swedish artist Cecilia Levy creates cups, saucers, bowls, plates and saucers out of paper, turning delicate 2D materials into layered 3D sculptures. Although she often uses books from the beginning of the last century, her choices are not narrow as she has also utilized Spiderman comics for an entire series.

To create each work, she takes apart the books, magazines, and comics, tearing the pages and pasting small pieces of them back together. Levy explains her works are, “eggshell thin, yet remarkably steady. The story lives on, but in a different shape.”

Cecilia Levy’s background is in graphic design and bookbinding, but began to experiment with dissecting books to produce different shapes in 2009. Since 2013 Levy has worked full time as a paper artist, exhibiting her work in both Sweden and abroad.

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#funandrandom 
 » see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/colossal/~3/aoVAUZYhoJE/

Turning into an iMall - Karmani Designer Lifestyle's growth journey

I'm really excited at how well I've been able to grow the Karmani Designer Lifestyle web site. It's gone from small-but-perfectly formed (well, not quite perfectly but you get the gist...) to a small and growing bustling, boutique-filled iMall.

Here's some of my experiences of on the way. If you're thinking of doing something similar maybe they'll help some :)

Lesson 1 learned - it pays dividends to get the site navigation sorted right from the word go so that
  1. it's functional (mobile and desktop)
  2. it's natural for your visitors to use
  3. it can cope with HUGE expansion of the website
  4. it can be automaitcally generated - no exceptions or tweaks

I didn't do so great at 2), though I think I can fix it.

The overall set-up decision I took was to divide the website store (the iMall) into 'boutiques', with each boutique divided into 'booths' (each with lots of 'shelves', though that's maybe taking the analogy one step too far.)

I liked this approach because of the flexibility. It gives me the opportunity to have a boutique for a particular topic or theme (winter sports) and within have a booth for each of the sub-topics (skiing, curling, luge etc). Then within each booth you get a pile (sorry, shelf ;) ) of clothing, one for accessories, one for cases for your mobile tech and so on.



But I can also go the other way and have a boutique specific to a grouping of product lines - say women's tops - and then have booths within for t-shirts, jackets, tank tops and so on. Then the shelves are filled with biker ones, ones with funny quotes, ones for cancer survivors etc etc.



At the moment the only way I've integrated the iMall (the boutiques section) into the rest of the site is via a Boutiques Guide page. I've linked to that page from my homepage as a bit of a kludge, just to make sure the search engine spiders can find all the boutiques and their contents as they wander around the rest of the site.

Introduction to the world

Ok, so it's all very well to have a lovely web site but how do you draw in the visitors - how do you get the passing footfall?- Publicising it is part of the answer, received wisdom but also common sense - if no roads lead to your mall, how will the visitors get there?

So this is what I've been doing, now that I'm happy with it. In the last week or so I've started to pin on pinterest the image that heads each boutique's entry in the boutiques guide. The pin leads back to that very section in the guide. As I pin more boutiques over the next few weeks I'll end up with some good quality links coming in from Pinterest and, if they get re-pinned, so much the better :)

At the same time, I've used the IfThisThenThat service to post to facebook and tweet those pins as I add them.

Knowing that Google indexes links on public shares on G+ very quickly, I've been sharing some there, too. I do need to refine that in some way.

Sitemap

I'm not leaving it to chance, though. I'm using a site map generating tool and uploading its output to our KDL account in Google's Webmastertools.  It's worked out well, with Google about a week behind, or slightly less, on indexing the newly added pages documented in the sitemap file.

Time lag

I started all this around the 19th June and it's taken until the last couple of days (it's now 15th July)  to see the first visits to the boutiques starting to come from people using the Google search engine.

So achievements to date 

Early to mid June:



spent developing my own and using a mish-mash of tools to do:
  • Content management - manual entry into a specially-designed database
  • Boutiqe generation by automatically running the managed content through a template
    (via ZazMySite - if you're familiar with that tool?)
  • Sitemap generation (see above)
Mid to late June:  start uploading generated boutiques. Find issues. Correct tools. Regenerate. Automate more with macros.
Early July: Make tools more flexible.
July to date: Create more boutiques and get them uploaded and site-mapped.

12th July: first visitors to boutiques from peeps searching on Google. Yaay! Happy dance!

As at 15th July: 1600 pages added for the various boutiques. 1200 indexed by Google so far.

So let's see what the future brings...