As a blogger or someone responsible for updating and adding content to a website, you must understand sizing photos for the web. If your photos have a large file size or dimensions that are too great your site may not function optimally. Sizing images correctly for your website will enhance page load speeds.

You should have pre-determined dimensions for your photos. For example on our site, we never embed a photo wider than 500 pixels in a page. Keeping to this standard insures that there is consistency across our site.

Photo editing options

While there are many image editing programs around, like Adobe Photoshop, Picasa is a robust image editing program that is free. Other choices include:  Windows photo editing program Microsoft Picture Manager for PCs and  iPhoto for Macs.

Image editing video

Our brief video tutorial demonstrates how to crop and size images for use on the Web with Google’s free photo editing program Picasa.

If you don’t see the embedded video because you’re reading this in our newsletter, click to watch it on YouTube.

To download Picasa, you may click the links below.

Picasa for Mac.

Picasa for PCs.

If you have problems editing your photos for use on your website, contact us for assistance. We will be glad to edit your photos for you.

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So according to the US Census, that means that there are approximately 275,000,000 over the age of 12. If 40% of them are using Facebook, that means that approximately 110,000,000+/- are using Facebook every week!

That’s a lot of oversharing, likes, and games!

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The digital connected consumer may not look like who you expect them to look like.

Grandma’s texting and watching television. While her neighbors are checking in on Facebook and ordering pizza all while interacting with friends on their smartphones.

According to a new survey of consumers from IBM, “Behavior-based segmentation is now essential to delivering compelling consumer experiences.” In an article in Bulldog Reporter summarizing significant findings, it is reported that the IBM study notes the compelling statistic that over 50% of U.S. consumers are “using online sources for breaking news.”

You can find the IBM executive summary by clicking this link.

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We recommend and use strategic content creation to gain strong search engine results for organic search. Recently marketing officers were asked which tactic they found most successful for SEO (search engine optimization.)

It’s not a surprise that 50% of those responding found that content creation was very effective for driving search engine results.

In their article, Marketing Sherpa noted:

Unique and well-written content gives search engine spiders something to index, and supports the search engine’s goal of providing the most relevant results in response to a query.
Relevance, in the eyes of the searcher, is content that deals with the questions they ask – and even other questions before they ask them. For these reasons and more, good content is the backbone of any website.

Read the entire article from Marketing Sherpa.

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Many marketing managers and business owners use social media for business. Those responsible for marketing are using social media to their advantage. What works best and why? What tools are gaining in use?

YouTube is the channel that is gaining momentum. And MySpace continues to be a non-starter with marketing managers. Seasoned marketing managers using social media for business spend up to six hours per week in social media. Those among the most seasoned users spend as much as 16 hours per week in social media.

This infographic from Pagemodo shares the latest insight into how social media for business is growing among marketers.

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