Amy Vierra
I survive here in Stockton, Ca. I am married and have a 10 year old daughter. Read more about me here...  
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June 24, 2008January 2, 2008Web Design RatesCurrently and since I am going to finally get my freelance design off the ground I have settled on a price structure. I found this blog post and I don’t think I will be charging nearly as much until I build a professional portfolio. Good thing I have various contract jobs I am already working. I will write more about my decided on price structure, how I arrived at that and how i’ll live. December 31, 2007Have a Happy New YearI hope every one that reads this, and every one who doesn’t, has a Happy New Year! Good luck with your blogging in 2008! December 30, 2007Straight from your favorite rockstar - buying music onlineThis isn’t really a web design or SEO post, but it has very much to do with web development. In this case we focus on the ever popular subject of online music and the demise of the record lable. x;) I believe the musicians have all the power at their finger tips with digital downloads, or selling their music online, via their official websites. I would download the latest Courtney Love album via her website. I could buy it down load it to a player or burn a cd. Provided its cheaper I mean we aren’t paying for packaging. There is the case of, well, the case and the cd art work. Do people like to have the case and the cd’s art work and all that? How about you let us decide and sell it all online. Here is the suggestion, sell the music and sell the cd art work seperatley. Yes ART WORK SOLD SEPERATLEY. Who gives a crap if anyone buys the art work. The musicians want to sell their music. We don’t really give a shit what they put on the covers anymore anyway. We see them all over the internet every day practically in real time. I endorse buying music straight from the source. No middle men. Just straight to the fans. Try it. Radiohead was brave. I believe Courtney Love, if she has any sense at all, should try it. I think they will sell even more music and make more of their own money. I believe all the artists should try it. Of course, all the money that the record execs were taking will probably go to buying big time servers for all those juicy downloads! SEO and LinksThe 5 tasks for your website that I listed in the post below are SEO fundamentals for your website. Now we need to build on those fundamentals. Now we need links. There are plenty of ways to get links, but usually the tried and true way is to, well, socialize. Talk to people about your blog. Become familiar with their blogs. Then I think it is acceptable to ask to exchange links. Ultimately, you do need people to link to you. Slowly building your links is the best way to go. Of course by now everyone knows that buying links is a big no no for Google. So don’t buy any links. Google has already crucified paid post bloggers. Build your links slow, stick with your blog (as aged domains rank high), don’t email out of the blue asking for links and don’t buy any links! December 22, 2007SEO demistifyed 5 SEO tasks for your website.When I got back into blogging about a year ago I was astonished and confused at the science it has become. When I saw “SEO” I was like “wtf?”. My previous blogging endeavors weren’t consumed with search engine rankings. I acquired links by finding bloggers that were like me and there was no advertising. I automatically looked up “SEO” the first time I saw the acronym. Then after I read up on it I realized that basic editing and good web design practices and good content is all SEO really is.
I’m sure most bloggers are no strangers to these suggestions and some probably even scoff at the idea. But even if you aren’t interested in SEO these are basically good web design practices. December 12, 2007google’s new adsSo I am sure everyone has noticed googles new ads by now. You know how they have the arrows to switch ads. They give you the ability to shoose the add you want to see. I think it really is ingenious . It makes the a more interactive to the user and ups the chance of an ad on your site getting clicked on. My question is who is going to sit at one website flipping through some ones goggle ads? It would be useful say if you were visiting a specilty site and the ads were of course relavent to the sites content. You would then be able to find a specific ad for a deal you wanted to know more about or some thing that you were curious about checking out. I guess google felt more interactivity was needed or more clicks were needed. I ultimately I think they did it for all of the above. November 16, 2007Page Rank and paid linksSo on my personal blog, saintamyjane.net, the rank has dropped from 3 to 2 to 0. And doing some research and using common sense revealed to me why this has happend. First I was doing payperpost… then I ditched it to become apart of blogher ads. Well blogeher ads, as respectful as they are, wasn’t bringing in the money that payperpost was, but my page rank rose to 3. Yes I am a capitalist american, so sue me. Right now I need to make extra money, so I sell my soul and my blog space to the devil (payperpost) and a page rank of 0. Seriously, there are worse things. So anyway I did some research to see whats up Google’s virtual butt and I now see that they no likey paid links. So my question is Why should your Google page rank count on Payperpost if Google doesn’t like paid links? Payperpost advertisers are going after page ranks and it won’t matter. How will they get there message across if google won’t rank paid link blogs high. Really it makes no sense to me. November 5, 2007Gradient BackgroundsRecently Yahoo redesigned the Yahoo HotJobs website. I LOVE the colors that they chose and I love the way they used the gradient. So Since I love it so much I decided to use gradients here and here. Setting this gradient feature as your background utilizes two applications. Your favorite graphics software and CSS. As for the software I use Fireworks and you can use good ‘ol note pad or similar text editor to edit the text. This site offers a great tutorial for adding this types of gradient back grounds I have used. November 1, 2007Adobe Photoshop and Word PressOn this latest design I used Adobe Photoshop brushes. I have never been formally trained on Photoshop and I always feel like a little kid flailing around in a swimming pool when I use it. I do manage to make some nice work though. So on my personal blog, http://saintamyjane.net. I used a snowflake brush in a light blue (#99ffcc) and light gray (#cccccc). I used the Parade font and the warping tool I think it was on the title for the wave effect. I really like this design. The back end of course is WordPress. Need a Word Press theme? Let me know! |
