SayShea: Indiana Kentucky Web Designer

Dress up your Firefox with a gorgeous “skin” designed by SayShea Web Studio!

Check out our gallery, and choose a glamorous skin to transform your browser, or hire SayShea to custom design a skin for your business.

Well I’ve taken the plunge and made a page for SayShea Web Studio on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, you should take a moment to check it out, and become a fan!

I believe having a presence for your business in as many places as possible is important, however it is easily one of the things that can be overlooked when you are dealing with so many other things in the daily craziness that you have to deal with in running a business. I know I am certainly guilty of this, as marketing myself is not always my strong suit, as I feel very humble in touting my own self! I am not the type to brag, so it’s always an ongoing challenge for myself to remember that advertising my services and presenting a good image for myself is NOT bragging, it’s necessary so that people know I exist so then hopefully they will feel confident in choosing me for my services and know-how in this field. With that said, putting yourself out there is something that definitely has to be done. Social networking is something every business should be looking toward as a powerful marketing tool.

If you have a business, and are on Facebook, what are you waiting for? It’s simple to create a page for your business, and it’s free advertising. So go for it! And as always, if you need any help or prefer to delegate, SayShea is available to help with your multi-media needs.

I use a lot of web services quite often, so I thought I’d list them out.

I will start out with Google first – Google is probably the number one thing I could not live without in the online world. Gmail - the BEST email service ever. You can manage any email account you have via Gmail. Anything you need to save is there for any time you need to reference it. It catches 99.9% of all spam, I rarely see a spam email. The best feature about Gmail is the integration into my Blackberry (as well as many other smartphones) via Google Mobile. I LOVE how it syncs my Contact list to the contact list on my phone. I no longer have to maintain multiple contact lists. Google Calendar syncs to my Blackberry calendar as well. I use these 3 services all the time, every single day. Oh and how can I forget Gtalk…I use it to talk with my best friend Emily all the time! Gmail saves and archives the chats too, if you want it to.

I also use Google’s Reader, Docs, Photos and Picasa, Google Pack, Desktop, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Maps. Google has really got it together in making their services so easy to utilize and sync across various platforms.

Regarding social tools, I wouldn’t be a true internet junkie without having profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, as well as several other more focalized networking sites. (tip: keep your Facebook and MySpace profiles and any other personal profiles you might have private, and only connect to those you know and trust.) LinkedIn is an excellent tool for building your professional network, and I highly recommend it for anyone who is serious about their career, regardless of the nature of your work (ie. it’s not just for web geeky types!)

I use Delicious social bookmarking to save all the exciting and intriguing websites that I uncover during my daily surfing. Truly, I wish there were so much more time in a day to read all the fantastic things I find during my explorations. From learning about web design, to home repair, gardening, pets, parenting, beauty, and anything else I run across, there is just so much knowledge at your fingertips. Del.icio.us helps me keep track of it all.

I’m a Firefox advocate of course and largely due to the magnitude of plugins available, such as Firebug, Adblock Plus, Html Validator, FEBE, Google Gears, Web Developer, Session Manager, and several others I utilize often.

Anyone who knows me knows that I collect 3 things: Shoes, Fonts, and Icons. While out and about on the web I spotted this exceptional free set of 128 icons, and all the designer is asking is that we share them!  I found the icons to have a nice consistent look and feel to them, and with 128 to choose from, there shouldn’t be any problem finding the right one for your need. They are in .png format, on a transparent background, with a size of 48 x 48px.

In my quest for an easy to understand way to set up a portfolio in wordpress, I have been all over the web, trying to wade my way through many different ways to do it and deciding how to best accomplish what I needed.  The following is the process I went through to achieve what I needed to set up my web design portfolio within the WordPress blogging platform:

1. Create a Post Category named Portfolio (or your choice of title).
2. Create a Page Category named Portfolio (or your choice of title).
3. Install and activate the Page Links To plugin.
   Then, click to the Portfolio Category, and copy the URL.  Go to the Page and edit the Page you’ve designated for your portfolio, and paste the URL in the “Page Links To” field at the bottom of the edit page. This will allow you to link to your portfolio from your main navigation.
4. Install and activate the ACE – Advanced Category Excluder plugin.
   Go to ACE » Settings, and check the first 3 boxes. This removes the Portfolio category from your category list.
   Then, go to ACE » Categories, and checkmark the Portfolio to hide it on the homepage section. Optionally you may also hide it from the archive section.  (I didn’t hide it from the other sections).
5. Install and activate the Reveal ID’s for Wordpress Admin plugin.
   This will allow you to easily identify the ID for the category your portfolio was assigned.  You need this number in order to make a custom category page, so that you can design your portfolio to display more like a portfolio than a blog post. You do that by copying your category.php and renaming it to category-7.php (for ex.  Replace the number with the ID your portfolio category has been assigned.

Stay tuned for part two where I explain how to customize the layout template for the Portfolio using custom fields.

These are some other options I considered, but didn’t quite seem to be what I needed.  However they may be useful to somebody out there!

1. Creating an image gallery with Wordpress bookmarks
2. Build a Dynamic Design Portfolio with Wordpress
3. Using the Wordpress Link Manager to Display your Portfolio